15 Minutes with Zachary Quinto of Heroes

Scene: Midtown Manhattan, early Friday evening. Weather: bordering on tempest sans teapot - it's dark and dreary, and sheets of rain pour down my windows. Could there be a better setting for an editor awaiting a call from Zachary Quinto, the man who portrays the power-hungry parasite Sylar on NBC's smash Monday night hit, Heroes? I bide my time with some of the extras on the Heroes: Season 1 DVD set - you can read my review of it here - until, finally, the phone rings. It must be him. I'm somewhat relieved to report that the first word out of his mouth isn't "brains," "murder," or even "boom," but rather a nice, simple "Hello."

The city must have anticipated your call today because we've had some apocalyptic rain here in the last hour. Ah. My character's energy precedes me.

So, of course, I've been going deep into the Heroes: Season 1 DVD set. Have you had a chance to look at any of it yourself? I just got it the other day on the DL [laughs]. So I'm looking forward to checking out stuff like the uncut version of the pilot that's 73 minutes long.

Heroes is one of the best-shot network shows on the air. Are there any scenes from the first season that look really great to you? A lot of them do, actually. It's hard to specify. It's kind of uniformly riveting to me when I watch it, and I'm someone who finds it difficult to be objective.

But I do like the look of a scene in one of the episodes I did with Sendhil [Ramamurthy, who plays idealistic genetics professor Mohinder Saresh]. I believe it was in "Unexpected," Episode 16, directed by Greg Beeman, where we were getting out of a car at the motel in Montana. That scene was so chilling and well done, a nice collaboration between our DP [Director of Photography Nate Goodman], art directors [Matthew Jacobs and Tom Taylor], me, and Sendhil. It was a nice, cohesive experience. I feel particularly strong about that scene, knowing what went into it and the energy that was around that day.

ARTICLE CONTENTS

X