As Season 6 of “Homeland” gets under way, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is a changed a woman.
Keeping her distance from CIA crony Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), she’s taken up legal advocacy work for Muslim Americans, working at a stripped-down office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her partner, professor Reda Hashem (Patrick Sabongui), is her idealistic equal. Together, they take on the case of Sekou Bah (J. Mallory McCree), a young man carted off by the FBI in the season premiere after being suspected by the government of supporting terrorism.
For a show that started seven years ago making Abu Nazir (Navid Neghaban), public enemy No. 1, it’s quite an about-face.
Sabongui, a Canadian-born actor of Egyptian descent, says “Homeland” was already beginning to atone for its portrayal of Muslims in Season 5.
“I think [Carrie and Reda] have a very strong case,” he says. “A lot of people are not supportive of the government’s national security apparatus. Obviously, Sekou’s a little more emphatic in his points, but the target of his attacks is the legal system. What are our civil liberties To what extent do we have free speech?”
Sabongui’s wife, actress, Kyra Zagorsky, tweeted out a photo of her husband when he got the call with the “Homeland” offer in August. “This is what unbearably good news looks like,” she wrote. Sabongui has filmed seven out of the 12 episodes on the jammed streets of Brooklyn, where he says the denizens came to the windows of the housing project where they lived to see what was going on.
“There’s a sense of pride so when they see cameras, they were like, ‘What are you guys doing here? This is our neighborhood,’” he says.
Filming in the summer often meant problems for the audio department, which had to compete with the annoying jingle from a Mister Softee truck. “We discussed, ‘Are we going to have to include the truck in the scene?,’ ” says Sabongui, 42. “The [dramatic] stakes were pretty high so I don’t know how we could have fit it.”
The bottom line for coming into such a well-established show was getting along with its star — and Sabongui, who is based in LA, says Danes is as friendly as she is focused.
“She is as good as you expect her to be,” he says. “She’s going to lock eyes with you and be in the scenes and you’d better be there too. In-between takes, she’s personable. Not like those actors who go away and hide and come out and be brilliant.”
Sabongui grew up speaking three languages — French, English and Arabic — in Montreal, a city he salutes for its diversity. “Everybody speaks at least two languages,” he says. “At some point in my upbringing, I was exposed to such a wide variety of people to draw on. It was everything you can hope for.”
He met his wife 14 years ago while acting in Denver. They live in LA with their two children. Chasing the next job means that one of them is on the road, and Sabongui says family life requires a lot of communication for everything to work smoothly.
“We’re going to have to live that bohemian lifestyle and roll with the punches and get the kids used to us being on that path,” he says. “They’ve become adaptable really quickly. When we’re both home, we have focused time together.”