GOLDeN HOuR
After filming the debut season of the NBC medical drama Brilliant Minds, Zachary Quinto steals away to the desert for a leisurely weekend of lounging.
From the November 2024 issue of Palm Springs LifeAs soon as he wrapped production on the inaugural season of his latest TV series, Zachary Quinto’s first stop was his barber. He wanted to transform the orderly ’do that he’d lived with for months, portraying a fussy doctor, into something much less structured. The actor-producer’s second stop was his bathroom mirror, where his tidy beard spontaneously morphed into a chunky ’stache that would’ve made Freddie Mercury proud.
“It might have been too extreme to go completely clean shaven, so the mustache is a stop along the way,” Quinto says, over brunch at La Quinta Resort & Club’s Twenty6 restaurant in early September. “But I’m also feeling it. I don’t know how long it’ll last.” (A few months, it turns out. He revealed a baby face on Instagram two weeks after his desert getaway.)
Quinto’s in-the-moment methodology goes beyond his approach to manicuring his mane. In every facet of life, he says, living in the present takes top priority. That extends to acting, and his starring role in the unconventional NBC medical drama Brilliant Minds, which premiered in late September and has become a hit — well, as much as any network series can be a hit in 2024. The premiere episode topped 9 million viewers across platforms in its first week and a half.
As the likes of ER, House, and Grey’s Anatomy have proven, medical dramas have the potential to run a loooong time on TV. Quinto could be playing doctor for decades. (He’s signed for at least six seasons, he notes.) On the other hand, it’s a very tumultuous time in Hollywood for TV, and as of press time, the series has yet to be renewed for a second season. For now, Quinto says, he’s accepting and embracing all possibilities.
Casablanca Rib Bouclé Polo / Gucci shorts / Vada sunglasses
Special thanks: John McIlwee and Bill Damaschke
Casablanca button-up shirt / Officine Generale trouser / Andy Wolf sunglasses / Bucherer Diamond Bangle from leeds & Son | Bucherer
“I want the choices I make to come from a place of where I am right now instead of where I think that decision might take me,” says Quinto, dressed casually in athletic shorts and a tank top, accessorized with several pieces of jewelry and lots of chest hair. He methodically douses his scrambled eggs with a thin layer of hot sauce. “It’s really about sharpening my connection to inner knowing and intuition, making decisions from within myself rather than from the calibration of external variables that I really can’t control.”
If that sounds too cerebral, it’s likely because Quinto spent a big chunk of the past year as a modern-day version of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the pioneering 20th-century neurologist who humanized his patients and demystified their conditions in books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). The brain has been top of mind for Quinto, an unapologetically intense performer known for his breakout turns as a superpowered serial killer in NBC’s Heroes and a resolute Spock 2.0 in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies.
Going on 25 years in the business, Quinto’s strong presence, keen versatility, and unwavering commitment to storytelling has led to an almost constant stream of acting roles, whether on TV screens and stages or in movie theaters and voiceover booths. His range never seems relegated to the mediums in which he works. He’s managed to captivate audiences as a risk analyst, a demented psychiatrist, a repressed divorcé, and an adolescent-obsessed vampire.
“I want the choices I make to come from a place of where I am right now instead of where that decision might take me.”
Brilliant Minds marks not only Quinto’s return to television but to the spotlight. The year 2020 was supposed to be a big one for the actor. Netflix released the Ryan Murphy–led film adaptation of Boys in the Band, a familiar story for Quinto, who had also starred in the stage revival on Broadway a couple years prior. “I went into the beginning of 2020 feeling great,” he says. “I was a bit of a free agent. I’d just finished this job. Now what? Well, the ‘now what’ was the pandemic — everything changed for me in terms of my relationship to publicity and the forward-facing part of my experience. After we released Boys in the Band, I put my publicists on hiatus [and] got off Instagram. I decided to retreat a little bit.”
To the delight of fans, Quinto has willingly swung the pendulum back in the other direction, feverishly promoting Brilliant Minds on talk shows, magazine covers, and social media.
Created by Michael Grassi, whose previous credits include the likes of Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, the series centers on Quinto as the deft Dr. Oliver Wolf, who — like Sacks — cultivates ferns and rides a motorcycle between diagnoses and treatment of rare neurological and mental health conditions. When Wolf accepts a position at Bronx General, he agrees to lead a team of whip-smart interns, each with their own issues and idiosyncrasies.
The show has been unexpectedly therapeutic for Quinto. The character dynamics between Wolf and his parents (played by Gray Powell and Donna Murphy) are key to the narrative arc. Quinto’s father died of cancer when he was 7, and his mother passed in 2021. “I had a beautifully complicated relationship with my mother,” Quinto says. “I love the opportunity to explore those kinds of stories. I felt like there were so many aspects of the relationship between Wolf and his mother that paralleled my own life that Michael had no idea that he was writing. It was uncanny to me. It’s been its own kind of cathartic, healing experience for me to explore.”
amiri Cardigan, Silk Shirt, and Pants / Doucal’s shoes / Tudor watch from Leeds & Son | Bucherer
Grassi acknowledges that Quinto was “always the person who was on my vision board, for lack of a better word, to play Dr. Wolf.” He was developing the series for NBC with hitmaker Greg Berlanti while Quinto was appearing on London’s West End as Gore Vidal in Best of Enemies. Grassi was elated when his prospective leading man agreed to read the script and meet about it on a video call.
“I’ve always been a huge Zachary Quinto fan — on screen and off,” Grassi says. “He’s magnetic, and he has this inherent intelligence and wit to him. What’s interesting is that he’s played a lot of villains and been in a lot of genre [projects]. It was an exciting opportunity to have Zachary Quinto tackle a role that’s not sci-fi and not the villain. He’s playing somebody who’s working day and night to help people live their best lives while neglecting to live his own.”
Back at brunch, Quinto is dissecting the similarities and differences between the real-life Sacks, who died at age 82 in 2015, and the fictitious Wolf. For starters, they both suffer from facial blindness, known as prosopagnosia. They’re both gay but on very different journeys. Sacks, who struggled with his sexuality throughout most of his life, was celibate for 35 years before publicly coming out. (“Can you even imagine?” Quinto asks with a sharp twist of his eyes.) Wolf, however, is out from the start and tests romantic waters throughout the show’s first season.
While there have been several openly LGBTQ+ doctors depicted in medical dramas, it’s rare for a procedural to center around one — a milestone that both Grassi and Quinto have celebrated through the production of Brilliant Minds. Quinto came out publicly in 2011 and has long been a champion for LGBTQ+ rights and projects. One of those was the 2023 docuseries Historical Homos from Idyllwild Pictures, a production company led by husbands Donal Brophy and Emrhys Cooper, Quinto’s pals who keep a home in Palm Springs. Quinto served as an executive producer on the Dekkoo streaming series.
Since he moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999, Pittsburgh-born Quinto has leisurely visited the Coachella Valley several times. “I find it incredibly relaxing,” he says of the desert. “It’s a great place to lounge.”
He pauses to reflect on his turn of phrase. “That’s the word I would use for my experience out here: lounge. It’s the kind of place where the experience — reading, cooking with friends, playing games at home — is informed by the environment. I like to unwind more than I like to wind up.”
Brophy serendipitously met Quinto in New York at a whiskey bar he owned in the West Village. Quinto was making his Broadway debut in the 2013 revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, while Brophy had given up on acting to become a restaurateur. “He just sauntered in, and we became besties,” Brophy recalls over the phone from England. “He was listening to me complain about how much I missed acting. Honestly, I think he got tired of hearing me complain and recommended me to this incredible acting coach.”
Casablanca rib Bouclé Polo / gucci shorts
One night, Quinto invited him to a dinner party hosted by the late Hollywood producer and talent manager Sandy Gallin. Brophy was seated next to Barbra Streisand, and Quinto delicately stopped him from freaking out. “He was good at holding my hand through A-list situations in which he maneuvers very well,” Brophy says. “Obviously, he’s an extremely intelligent guy, and he’s very measured. He has this poise and composure that I’ve always looked up to and admired.”
When it comes to personal style, Quinto is similarly unbothered. He estimates that he only shops twice a year for new clothes. “If I go shopping, I’m rarely going to bring stuff home,” he says. “I want things to be streamlined in my life, so I get rid of stuff all the time.” The biggest change to his personal aesthetic in recent years is wearing gold instead of silver. Why? “It was just a feeling,” he answers after a long pause, seemingly disappointed for not having something more specific to say.
One of Quinto’s latest prized possessions is a Rolex from the year he was born: 1977. He’s quick to point out that he’s not an horological obsessive. He has about four nice timepieces that he’s invested in as an adult. “I just loved the fact that it was silver and gold,” he says with a cutesy grin. “I guess that was the beginning of my journey to [wearing] gold.”
Otherwise, Quinto’s not much of an accumulator. “My life is a collection of things that I pick up as I go,” he says, somewhat wistfully, as brunch comes to a close. “I’ll see things and be drawn to them. I love to collect things when I travel. I like to go to markets, souks, and bazaars. When I’m in a new place, I always try to get something that I can bring back, so my home is a collection of things like that.”
Derek Rose robe
While he waits to hear if Brilliant Minds will be picked up for a second season, he’s starring with Shailene Woodley in the new play Cult of Love on Broadway this winter.
“I knew I wanted to do a play as soon as I finished Brilliant Minds because there’s no telling what’s going to happen with the show,” Quinto says. “If we get a second season, then chances are, this is the only window I’ll have to do a play.” Messy hair, a vintage Rolex, a hit TV show, and another stint on Broadway. As of this moment, everything is golden for Zachary Quinto.