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Zach Sunday Times Interview

 Posted by zacharyquintouk on January 24, 2012 at 6:20 AM

Zachary Quinto is peering across the room. “Is that Lou Reed?” It is. On the other side of the cafe, taking a seat, is Mr Walk on the Wild Side: grizzled, rumpled, hooded eyes lending him the appearance of a walrus fending off another sleepless night. “So cool,” Quinto says, “I love that guy. Just think about the life he’s lived, the people he’s seen. I’ve been so plugged into that lately - the human journey. As you get older you start to realise just how fleeting our time is.” He pauses, catches himself. “Sorry to be weird and philosophical so early in the morning.”

He returns to his breakfast: avocado toast, a bowl of fruit, orange juice. We are in a favourite haunt of the actor’s, Cafe Gitane at the Jane Hotel, in Manhattan’s West Village. He is wearing a woollen hat pulled down over his jet-black hair, although, if it’s civilian mufti he’s after, he really needs to do something about those eyebrows: as thick and dark as Liz Taylor’s, and instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen 2009’s Star Trek, in which Quinto brought sombre self-possession to the role of Spock, the still centre of a busy blockbuster. That internalised perplexity is something of a speciality. In his new film, Margin Call, he plays a young risk analyst at a Wall Street investment firm who discovers that the company’s entire stock is about to liquefy, unless they dump it fast. Quinto’s boss is played by Kevin Spacey. And his boss is played by Jeremy Irons – an infinite regress of man-eaters that pulls you into a long night of nerves, bad equity and overleveraged assets, all melting into the air of another Manhattan dawn. The date is October 2008.

“You’re seeing behind the curtain,” says Quinto, 34, who produced as well as acted in the film, interrupting his producing duties a few months before cameras rolled so he could spend a few days with risk analysts and traders at Citibank, getting inside the head of the people who brought the financial world to its knees a little more than three years ago. “It’s enormously important to understand and love the characters I play,” he says. “There were some really unscrupulous decisions that were made. Obviously. But people were buying their houses and driving their big cars they couldn’t afford. There was cultural complicity the world over, but particularly, and most egregiously, here in the states. That’s what we’re looking at.”

The film has been attracting rave reviews and has even been suggested as a dark-horse Oscar contender. The New Yorker critic David Denby called the film “one of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made”. Written and directed by a first-timer, JC Chandor, it plays a little like a cross between a David Mamet play and an end-of-the-world apocalypse flick, with subprime mortgages playing the role of the giant asteroid. When Chandor wrote the script, he deliberately left many of the characters’ lines unfinished, wanting to achieve the sense of men approaching the edge of the cliff, or moral vertigo.

“This movie would have gone off the rails very quickly if everyone had started chewing the scenery,” says Chandor, crediting his cast for the film’s solemn power. “Zach is very, very driven. It’s something I didn’t know before I met him but there’s this drive in him that bubbles to the surface, without being spoken. His great gift is for suggesting inner monologue – conversations within himself – without saying a word. That takes confidence.”

Just how confident was revealed during the American publicity tour for the film. Nearing the end of his last interview if the day, with New York magazine, Quinto took the opportunity to come out as gay. It was something of an open secret; he had never hidden his sexuality from anyone who knew or worked with him; and he had taken gay roles, not least in a stage production of the Aids drama Angels in America. If anything, it had made him even more impatient with the disjunction between his public and private selves. A rash of teenage gay suicides in America settled the matter.

“I didn’t tell anybody I was going to do it,” he says. “I didn’t tell my agent, I didn’t tell my business partners, I didn’t tell my publicists. It’s so funny, because obviously it was a huge decision for me, and I made it in a specific way. It was very much on my terms. But I never thought beyond the act of doing it. I never thought about the reaction it would generate. Honestly.” As the story fanned out on the internet he was taken aback by the size of the response, with offers of support coming from all corners of the globe.

“Zach is a fairly humble guy,” Chandor says. He had not thought through the scope of it, for sure. To find out it was such a big issue for people was, I think, exciting and invigorating. I gave him a hug right there on the street It felt like a weight had been lifted off him.”

Despite its public avowals of liberalism, Hollywood’s history with homosexuality has been frightful. One thinks of the blackmailing of Rock Hudson, the hounding of Tab Hunter, the alcoholic demise of Montgomery Clift. Straight actors such as Tom Hanks, Sean Penn and Colin Firth win praise and awards for the “bravery” needed to play gay, as long as the character ends up in the dumpster – Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, features a ‘necrology’ of gay characters’ on-screen deaths – but woe betide the gay actor within a mile radius of heart-throb status who decides to come out.

“The torment those people feel – and I know it because I’ve seen it, I know it in people – is so heavy, so painful,” Quinto says. “Things need to change. This is just bullshit at a certain point. I’m not going to live my life based on fear of other peoples judgements. If somebody doesn’t want to work with me because I’m gay, then I don’t want to work with them anyway.” Still, one can’t help wondering about mainstream audiences – the soda-sucking multiplexers and burping mall rats. I ask if his decision, or the factors that weighted into it, might have been different had he been playing Kirk, rather than Spock.

“Gay or straight, my trajectory has never been conventional. My journey has never been conventional. I’m not interested in that. That’s not what I’m about. But if I was playing Kirk, if I was more of a traditional leading man, I still don’t think it would make a difference. I certainly don’t think it should.”

Quinto’s history-making declaration – as the first openly gay star of a major studio franchise – sits at the intersection of two contrary streams in American culture, where the job of actor is always contaminated, to a lesser or greater degree, by the star system. The job of being someone else is always at odds with the encouragement for the star to just be themselves, in film after film. “I think it’s handled differently in Britain,” he says. “There’s a focus on the craft, an implicit integrity in the craft of acting. That’s the world I come from, I’m a classically trained actor.”

He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; his father, a barber, died of cancer when he was seven, a loss he says helped propel him towards acting. “Acting became a shelter, literally and figuratively. Something was awakened in me really quick. Losing my father young put me in a unique position of independence and self-sufficiency ,and reliance on my own resources. At so many points, I’ve felt like the faith I’ve had in myself even when I didn’t feel that anybody else did, was the thing that got me to the next level.”

He studied acting for four years at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, and always saw himself heading for the New York stage, but after drawing an enthusiastic response at an acting showcase – organised by the school so students could strut their stuff for prospective agents and casting directors – Quinto was persuaded to move to LA.

He auditioned and waited tables for three or four years before getting a small part as an art student on he TV series Six Feet Under, which convinced him to quit his day job. It wasn’t as large as he’d hoped – “I was in one episode, and had about five lines” – but more TV work followed, and three years later he scooped the role of Sylar, the serial-killer nemesis in the NBC superhero soap Heroes, who siphons off powers. It was a short step from there to the cool logician Spock, warmed up in JJ Abrams’ reboot by a smooch with Lieutenant Uhura – an interspecies love affair that, if anything, gains extra topspin from Quinto’s recent revelations.

“Ah, but you’re doing the very thing we were just talking about,” he responds. “You’re making an assumption about the character based on what you know about my sexuality. Spock is not gay. There’s nothing gay about him. So separating yourself out from that is an interesting and challenging notion”. At the same time. He says: “I don’t think there’s any mistake in the roles we play and the things that define our careers. Spock and Sylar, the two characters I’m most commonly associated with, were both very contained, very internal. There’s a lot going on below the surface.”

He looks forward to roles that might better reflect his own personal glasnost: “Maybe a character whose boundaries are not so specific, a little more extrovert, a little looser.” He is about to start work on the new Star Trek movie, its script cloaked in as much secrecy as we have come to expect from Abrams. “I think it’s going to be a little raucous,” Quinto promises. “We have to go in bold new directions – no pun intended. I think I’m in an interesting spot now. I’ve created an opportunity for myself and an opportunity for the industry to support. I’m still starring in giant action films. And now I can be arguably one of the only openly gay people doing that. That, for me, makes a difference, for people who need a difference to be made.”

Lest that sound too crusading, he tells me that, at the Gotham awards last November, when someone asked him what, if anything, had changed in his day-to-day existence, he said: “Someone asked me that last night. I told them, ‘I still pick up my dog’s poop’.”

Tom Shone. The Sunday Times. January 16th 2012. Thanks to Beederific.

Thank you to Kirsty at @zacharyquintouk for making the interview available to us.  Check her website; it’s great!!!

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