ZACHARY QUINTO’S LOCKDOWN DIARY
The ‘Star Trek’ actor has spent his time checking out classic films and meditating
On the night of March 11, as the coronavirus clamped down on cultural life, actor Zachary Quinto was in the audience at a Broadway theatre, watching the recent revival of West Side Story.
“There was something in the air that felt like a cloud was descending,” Quinto recalled, “but it hadn’t yet landed.”
He’d been planning to see a bevy of shows: Caroline, or Change, Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? …“I was in the starter block to go on a marathon,” he said.
It didn’t happen: Broadway shut down the next day.
Soon after, Quinto left the city to stay with friends in the Hamptons. He filled the cultural void with movies, books and Take Me to the World, the Stephen Sondheim tribute that was livestreamed in April.
Quinto, known for playing the sharp-minded Spock in the most recent Star Trek movies, is now on TV in the second season of AMC’s
NOS4A2 , a supernatural drama that casts him as an age-shifting villain who consumes the souls of children. Over the phone, he discussed the cultural content he consumed during quarantine weekends in the Hamptons.
FRIDAY NIGHT
I’m quarantining with some friends who have more 9-to-5 schedules, so the weekends are times when we can all congregate a little more freely. We rewatched
Y Tu Mama Tambien. We rewatched Talk to Her — Almodovar is one of my favourite filmmakers of all time.
I watched this really amazing Chinese film called Ash Is Purest
White. We rewatched Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
SATURDAY MORNING
I wake up usually between
8.30 and 9. I let the dogs out, run around, feed them. I have a 10-year-old terrier mix named Skunk — he’s a little guy, like 20 pounds. And then in January, when I was in Los Angeles, I found a dog on the street and took him in. He was at the time a three-month-old shepherd mix who was probably about 25 pounds — and now he’s a seven-month-old shepherd mix who’s pushing 60, 65 pounds. His name’s River.
Meditation, for me, is something that’s a nonnegotiable. I do it first thing when I wake up. Even when I don’t have time, I make time for it. Twice a day. At the minimum, my sessions are 20 minutes. And then depending on what kind of a programme I’m doing that day, they can go as long as 55 minutes.
On the weekends there’s always music playing in the morning. There are a number of people here, so you never know who will connect to the speaker and just start playing music. We try to keep things mellow around the house. So a lot of Joni Mitchell. My friend is really into Ethiopian music. There’s an artist whose name is Hailu Mergia — I’ve been listening to a radio playlist of that music.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
And then some kind of excursion on a Saturday to the beach, or we’ll go on a hike. It’s always kind of centered around the dogs.
We might throw a game of Monopoly in there. I’ll play the banjo at some point during the day, invariably. I’ve been playing for about six years. I now do at least one lesson a week with my teacher. We video-chat, which is actually a really great format for it.
SATURDAY NIGHT
A lot of cooking happens Monday through Friday, and then usually at least one night of the weekend we’ll order food in and pick it up. That’s also a part of really wanting to support local businesses.
Every night is about watching something. I’ve been diving into The Last Dance, that Michael Jordan documentary. I thought it was beautifully done and really compelling — the humanity mixed with the kind of supernatural talent that he possessed, but also that his teammates possessed.
ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (OR SATURDAY?)
The days do tend to blur together. If we’re not hiking or something, some kind of exercise vibe is important to stay connected and active. I love what’s emerging in these online communities, like Ryan Heffington’s Sweatfest.
I’ve tried to carve out time to get to books that I either have wanted to read or have been carrying around in my backpack with me for months. Right now, I’m reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. He’s such a fascinating, meticulous, thoughtful, imaginative writer. Reading him has opened me up to different aspects of my own psyche and my own kind of spiritual perspective in ways that I wouldn’t have necessarily imagined.
SUNDAY, 10PM
There remains that kind of “Sunday night, school night” awareness. I think around Sunday night at 10 o’clock, everybody starts to shift back into, “Oh, we should probably start winding this down.” A lot of my life has been — when I’m not on set for something or in rehearsal for something — there’s a lot of free-form nature to my days. I like the freedom. But I do think there’s something nice about resetting the clock each week.