Though Zachary Quinto has been acting in theater for his entire career, it wasn’t until his current starring role in The Glass Menagerie that Quinto made his Broadway debut. Though he’s appeared on stage in New York before — he starred in an off-Broadway production of Angels In America shortly after he starred in Star Trek — Quinto tells the Associate Press just how happy he is to fulfill his lifelong dream of finally making it “on” Broadway in New York.
Quinto reveals that he sees himself as currently living nearly every actor’s fantasy. He recalls, “I was walking to work today. I’ve been walking the past few days because it’s so beautiful out, so I walk from downtown. And I was like, ‘This is my life’ — living in Manhattan, a dream I’ve always had, and I’m walking to my theater on Broadway to do Tennessee Williams. It’s not lost on me. I really am humbled by it often. I feel really grateful.”
He points out that while he’s delighted about making his Broadway debut, he’s aware that much of it has to do with his recent Star Trek fame and less on his actual talent as an actor. He says, “The commercial theater landscape has become as driven by revenue as any box office of any film that opens. It’s driven by name value in a way that certainly isn’t used to be in the generation previous to mine. But it’s an inevitability and it’s something that I recognized when I was coming out of school and looking at film and television actors who had never done theater headlining Broadway shows.”
But Quinto figured that if he couldn’t get a role on Broadway on his talent alone, he’d have to become famous first and then conquer Broadway as a “name” to sell tickets. While he enjoys his television and film work, he confesses, “It was always a means to an end to me. I always felt like I wanted to be in L.A. so that I could come back here and do theater and now I’m making good on that promise to myself.”
However, by no means does Quinto want his Broadway experience to be a one-time accomplishment. He’s already hoping for a return engagement, revealing, “I didn’t want to come in, swoop in with my name above the title of the play like I was some Hollywood entity. I’ve been doing theater since I was 10. Theater’s my jam. It’s my life, ultimately. If I could make a living just doing theater, I feel like I really might.”
And regarding his walks to the theater, Quinto reveals that he isn’t recognized as the famed Vulcan as much as one would expect. He points to technology’s effect on our attention span as the cause, saying, “I frankly think our attention spans have dwindled so alarmingly that people aren’t necessarily as keen to inextricably associate an actor with a character as they used to. It’s a different landscape now. The metabolism for entertainment is so much faster that it doesn’t linger like it used to.”
via Yahoo!
