MORE THAN JUST SPOCK
Zachary Quinto diversifies
Ten storeys above Manhattan, Zachary Quinto leans back in a chair. Quinto’s look is so unintentionally villainous that it feels like this could be a setup straight from his latest movie, Hitman: Agent 47, based on the popular video game series.
Hitman — with its intrigue of genetically engineered killers (Quinto and Rupert Friend) vying to either save or destroy the life of a mysterious young woman, taps into something of a Quinto specialty: ambiguity. He’s on a brief hiatus from the months-long shoot for Star Trek Beyond, the third film of the rebooted franchise, and will soon head back to Vancouver.
It’s Quinto’s ability to be an emo- tional shape-shifter, the charmer who might also be dangerous — or the implacably stoic half-Vulcan who’s an amazing friend — that’s really distinguished him since his breakthrough role as serial killer Sylar on the sci-fi series Heroes.
The 38-year-old uses the same deftness he brings to his work while navigating public interest in his private life. In 2011, after much speculation on his sexual orientation, he told a New York Magazine reporter that, “as a gay man,” who was then starring on Broadway in Tony Kushner’s AIDS-epidemic play Angels in America, he’d been struggling to reconcile the fact of New York legalizing same-sex marriage in the same year that a gay teen, Jamey Rodemeyer, had committed suicide due to bullying.
It’s clear that Quinto had planned what he wanted to say (“it was motivated by those kids who were taking their lives,” he tells me), but hadn’t alerted the magazine in advance.
The payoff is getting to be freely affectionate with his boyfriend, model and figurative oil painter Miles McMillan, 25, even as they’re stalked by paparazzi. They met at a party two years ago and recently bought a loft together.
Hollywood has come a long way since Rupert Everett declared that coming out had torpedoed his career. “For me, personally, it’s interesting,” he says, “because I looked around when I got Star Trek, and I said to myself, ‘ Who could I look to for guidance for how to navigate this path that I’m on?’ And there wasn’t anybody.”
Now, six years after the first Star Trek film, Quinto’s casting in a bigbudget summer blockbuster again puts him in a league of one.
“I look around and say ‘OK, yes, there’s a lot of gay actors that are open, many more now than there were 10 years ago,’” he says. “But I still feel like I’m occupying kind of a unique space.”
I look around and say ‘OK, yes, there’s a lot of gay actors that are open, many more now than there were 10 years ago.’ ZACHARY QUINTO