Zachary Quinto seems to have been raised on humble pie. The usual Hollywood formula for rising stars is simple: add attention, and watch heads grow. As the world strains to glimpse the meteoric career arcs of the cast of Heroes, the show's bona fide super villain is busy in the corner, quietly counting his blessings.
'I look at my good fortune in the last nine months and I'm staggered,' says Quinto from Los Angeles. His voice is a soothing tenor. 'I couldn't be more humbled by it, or more excited.'
This unusually grounded attitude, generally lacking within the cliques of instant-hit shows such as Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill is something Quinto attributes to the large ensemble Heroes cast. He says in the face of all the attention, his fellow actors have maintained a sense of who they were before the show became a hit. It seems important to him that his peers care more about the work than they do the hype.
'There's a certain insidiousness about the publicity aspect of what we do. You hear a lot of stories about shows and actors and tempers and egos that eventually get fuelled in the tabloids,' he says. 'There's no cause for that in our group. It's a group of people who are all aware of their good fortune, and are grateful for their experiences.' Being level-headed might turn out to be the best strategy, especially for a show that's built on defying expectations. Creator Tim Kring recently revealed his own doubts on the prolonged popularity of his brain-child in an online interview with Entertainment Weekly. The creator says, 'The shelf life of shows seems to be getting shorter and shorter ... if you do something totally unexpected one week, the expectation is that you're going to have to do it again the next. The danger is that some of these ideas may seem less interesting than the year before.'
As a cast member, another good reason for pragmatism on Heroes might be the frequent character deaths. Essentially, no-one is safe, which keeps viewers guessing and glued to the screen. Kring's strategy to keep the show's high level of energy and suspense, also serves to keep the actors on their toes. Quinto's co-star Adrian Pasdar - who plays Nathan Petrelli, the literally high-flying politician, once joked that he thought he'd signed up to do a show called Heroes, and ended up in a show called Survivors.
For Quinto, surviving wasn't so much of an issue until the end of the first season in May this year. From his debut as the creepy watch-repairer in the eighth episode to the three-part season finale, Sylar was doing all the killing. 'The character of Sylar has shattered expectations from the beginning,' he says about the villain, whose costume was a hooded sweatshirt, faded black jeans and Converse high-tops. 'He's built up to be this over-bearing, really dark shadowy presence, for the first few episodes. Then you meet him and he's this meek, nerdy mild-mannered watchmaker. I think he had all the right ingredients of nuance, and complicated humanity mixed in with his pursuit of power.'