Quinto happy in his ‘unique space’
Star Trek star enjoying life, soaring career after coming out
Ten stories above Manhattan, Zachary Quinto leans back in a chair, inches away from a massive plate-glass window.
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 in town 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 to trade in his five o’clock shadow for the smooth skin, pointed ears and bowl cut of Spock.
Beyond physical transformation, though, it’s Quinto’s ability to be an emotional shape-shifter, the charmer who might also be dangerous — or the implacably stoic half-Vulcan who’s somehow 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. “Yeah, he had no idea, poor guy,” says Quinto, of the reporter. “He was like, ‘Uh, what?’ I could see him register what I had just said and he was like, ‘Oh my God, I might have just got a scoop,’ which he did. I didn’t tell anybody that I was going to do that. I wanted to make sure it was on my own terms and my own time.”
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. The night of our interview, the couple went to see Quinto’s ex, Jonathan Groff, perform in the smash Broadway musical, Hamilton, then put on costumes and rimmed their eyes with black liner for Madonna’s Gypsy-themed 57th birthday party in the Hamptons.
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
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.
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.”
Quinto has already overcome typecasting once in his career; coming off four seasons of Heroes, he knew he’d have to create opportunities to show off his range if he wanted to play more than a sci-fi villain. That’s partially why he cofounded the production company Before The Door Pictures, whose first feature was the 2011 financial crisis thriller Margin Call. Quinto plays a young risk analyst in the film, which ended up being nominated for an Academy Award.
If that film showed his cerebral side, then Hitman demonstrates that Quinto knows how to kick arse. Both he and Friend did most of their own stunts, including tumbles off tall scaffolding. The onscreen bitter rivals became good friends in the process. “Yeah,” says Quinto, “nothing like beating the s--- out of each other to bring you together.”
He’s developed a similar kind of camaraderie with the Star Trek cast, which has been helpful as the franchise moves from director J.J. Abrams to Justin Lin (who’s done three Fast & Furious movies). He doesn’t share many scenes with his good friend Chris Pine, who plays Captain Kirk, instead spending most of his screen time with Karl Urban’s Bones. “Those characters are so diametrically opposed that it’ll be nice to see them interacting,” he says.
Quinto’s greatest take-away from Star Trek is his friendship with the original Spock, the late Leonard Nimoy. Grabbing lunch together every week or two to talk about the character, says Quinto, eventually “became secondary to the fact that I just enjoyed spending time with him and I recognized a lot of qualities in him that I aspired to and I found him incredibly generous and intelligent and compassionate and funny.”
He also grew close to Nimoy’s wife and children. “Leonard and I were like family, absolutely.”
Quinto was in Munich for the first day of rehearsals on Oliver Stone’s forthcoming Edward Snowden biopic, Snowden, when he got the news that Nimoy had passed away from lung disease. “I knew that Leonard was leaving the world imminently,” says Quinto, but, “Leonard wanted me to focus on my work and take care of myself.”