Zachary Quinto: 'There's a tremendous fear around openly gay men in our industry'
Ihear Zachary Quinto before I see him. The voice of the actor who played Mr Spock in the rebooted Star Trek films comes thundering through the closed door of the central London rehearsal building – a repurposed church – as I sit outside waiting. He’s rehearsing the climactic scene from the play Best of Enemies, a restaging of the infamous Sixties TV confrontation between novelist and essayist Gore Vidal (Quinto) and right-wing TV host William F Buckley. “The play moves at a tremendous clip,” Quinto tells me shortly after. “It feels like you’re sitting on top of a locomotive, and you have no choice but to stay there.” Judging by the combustible force I overheard, it certainly sounds that way.
The rehearsal breaks for lunch, and I am allowed in; Quinto follows me up a steep flight of steps to a small platform at the top of the building. He may have sounded ready for the Noël Coward Theatre, but the vibe is still very much “come as you are”: a pair of overalls and a beanie hat. The 45-year-old Quinto joined the production after its Broadway run, replacing Charles Edwards. Buckley, meanwhile, is played as before by David Harewood, in an intriguing piece of race-blind casting. Speaking to The Independent last year, Harewood described Best of Enemies as “tough”, noting that it included “an enormous amount of lines”. It’s certainly chewy material, a change of step from the genre work for which Quinto is best known – Heroes; American Horror Story; the Star Trekreboot. Written by James Graham, the play fictionalises the real-life 1968 ATV debates between Vidal and Buckley – a vitriolic sparring session which culminated in Vidal calling his opponent a “crypto-Nazi”, and Buckley threatening violence and calling Vidal – who identified as bisexual – a “queer”.
The debate was, says Quinto, a portentous moment not just for the tenor of TV newscasting, but for the entire American political discourse. “It was a revolutionary act in terms of the format of the news,” Quinto explains. “Consider what debate used to be, a generation or two ago: two people with different beliefs would have an opportunity to express their point of view in turn. Then look at where the last 55 years has taken us.”
He continues: “It’s just continued to deteriorate, to the point where now, debate has largely just become about people screaming at one another and saying, ‘I’m right; you’re wrong. Not only do I disagree with you, I hate you for your beliefs.’ I think television is the variable in that equation. It changed – and in many ways denigrated – the integrity of debate.”
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