In anticipation of tonight’s third season premiere of HEROES [see preview], theTVaddict.com thought we’d spend a few moments shining a spotlight on actor Zachary Quinto, who has risen to fame playing America’s favorite super-villain Sylar.

On the new season: In a far more diplomatic manner than this TV Addict might have put it, Zachary Quinto promises that the new Chapter of HEROES, titled “Villains” will be far more entertaining that last season’s suck fest underwhelming “Generations” installment, “I think that the scripts this season are just, you know, more exciting and more action-packed, and more dynamic than ever. I think it just keeps getting better and more – you know, every time I open a script it’s truly a thrill.”

On what’s in store for Sylar: There’s a lot of unexpected turns this year for my character and every time I open a script there’s just a different kind of challenge. Whether it’s a either physical challenge in terms of a fight sequence or a stunt sequence that we’re doing, or a special effects sequence that we’re doing, or emotional challenge in terms of what Sylar’s coming up against in himself, and what he’s coming up against outside of himself with the people that he’s interacting with. I think the tapestry of that has been incredibly rich this year for my character, in particular. So it’s been really – it’s been a ride for sure.

On Sylar’s increasingly ‘human’ tendencies: With Zachary Quinto standing by his television alter ego, explaining that, “Sylar’s evil is rooted in a great humanity and in a lot of smallness, and a feeling of sort of emptiness.” It’s only natural to wonder, will Sylar ever turn to the good side? And more importantly, will he finally meet that special someone to help him on the path towards good? Teases showrunner Tim Kring, “He’ll have a series of very human relationships in this volume alone.” Interesting…

On becoming a Science Fiction Icon: I never imagined that my experience would lead me so deeply into the comic book and science fiction world as it has. But again it’s something that I’m incredibly grateful for.

On his ever-expanding fanbase: It’s a really exciting group of fans, you know, and so I feel like that’s something else that is an added bonus to the whole thing. It’s like probably the most ardent group of people that you could ever be working for in terms of fans and their enthusiasm for the stories that you’re telling.

On playing that other famous character that stars with the letter “S”: America’s favorite Super-Villain will seamlessly segway into an American icon of a different sort having already donned the prosthetic ears to play Spock in the upcoming J.J. Abrams feature film STAR TREK, “I feel like my experience on HEROES and the world in which it’s rooted lends itself to the attention that led me to be a part of the movie.”

You can catch Sylar’s return on HEROES Special Two-Hour season premiere airing tonight at 8PM on NBC [GlobalTV in Canada]

One of the more interesting things HEROES star Zachary Quinto revealed to the TV Addict during our recent interview was the fact that you can thank him for the hiring of Kristen Bell. Says Quinto, only half-jokingly, “I take full responsibility for her inclusion in the show.”

“Kristen and I have been friends for years. We actually decided to take the train back from July’s Comic Con. And as we were waiting in line for the train, we ran into HEROES writers Joe Pokaski, Aron Eli Coleite and Michael Green.” Elaborates the watchmaker, “Turns out they were actually writing scenes for the character that would become Kristen’s. So it was really interesting to get a text message from her a week later saying — Hey, some really great news. Call me when you get this, or I can just tell you when I see you on the set of OUR show.”

Continues executive producer Jeph Loeb. “Kristen was one of those happy surprises where we were trying to find someone to play the part who could just walk into the role immediately and get the audience excited.”

Well, Mr. Loeb consider your mission accomplished. This TV Addict could not be more excited for tonight’s fifth chapter of HEROES. Don’t miss the first appearance by Kristen Bell’s mysterious Elle tonight at 9PM on NBC [GLOBAL in Canada]

Back in August, the TV Addict was lucky enough to sit down with a couple of HEROES you may be familiar with. The following is part 2 of my conversation with Zachary Quinto, Noah Gray Cabey and Executive Producer Jeph Loeb

The TV Addict: Sitting across from you [to Zachary Quinto] I can’t help but notice some mannerisms that one might consider Vulcan. The way you’re sitting, your speech patterns. What can you tell fans about playing Spock and about taking over such an iconic character from Leonard Nimoy.

Zachary Quinto: I actually have yet to read the script [Editor's note: This interview took place in August]. I’m actually going to sit with JJ Abrams either Tuesday or Wednesday and read it when I get back. That said, I certainly have a sense of where the story is going. I talked to Bob [Robert Orci] and Alex [Kurtzman] who wrote it, and they told me quite a lot. But their feeling is that they really want to make sure that they could do the work they needed to do without worrying about anybody’s real opinion. Because obviously once they start including all of us actors, there’s going to be a lot of other voices chiming in on it.

Aside from that, I’ve been immersing myself in other kinds of research and other conversations, and certainly reading a great deal about the mythology and the sort of ethical code of the Vulcan, and there’s so much material that’s really sort of an actor’s dream.

Does it ever concern you that you may be typecast in your roles as “Sylar” and “Micah” for the rest of your career?

Zachary Quinto: No, I don’t think like that. If anything, being on HEROES gives me a platform to go in so many different directions with my career. If you asked me when I was starting out, or in college, I never would have guessed that Sci-fi would have been the ticket to the kind of exposure I’ve experienced in the past year. But I’m really glad that it has been, because there’s a lot to learn and I think the underlying themes in science fiction tend to be optimistic and hopeful. I really think that for me this is just the beginning. And I know that’s true for Noah as well.

Noah Gray Cabey: HEROES isn’t just Sci-fi. It’s also a drama. So I feel like this is a huge opportunity as an actor.

Zachary Quinto: And also, the genre’s become so mainstream. It’s not what it was when they were doing the original STAR TREk.

Jeph Loeb: I don’t think your limitations are limited by who you are. When you look at Sean Connery’s career, it’s much different than Pierce Brosnan’s career. So his ability to transcend Bond and become who he was, that had to do with him, not with whether or not he was type cast. So I don’t worry about that our cast. I think our cast will go on. If any of them left the show tomorrow, I think that they would be on another show if that’s what they wanted, or they could have movies. I know what happens during hiatus, they all got movie offers.

Zachary Quinto: Look at Santiago [Cabrera]. He left the show and now he’s doing this fantastic film with Benicio Del Toro.

The TV Addict: I felt so bad for Santiago, getting killed off a hit show.

Zachary Quinto: You feel bad! I’m the one working with him all the time. I’m the one who was walking around and killing all these great actors.

HEROES fans, don’t forget to tune into a brand new episode tonight in NBC at 9PM [GLOBAL in Canada]

Imagine for a second you walk into a dark and empty room, only to be confronted by none other than Sylar. Do you run? Hide? Or quickly remember that you’ve actually been invited by Global TV to meet television’s most infamous villain.

Thankfully, rather than run, this TV Addict quickly realized the latter, as he sat down with HEROES stars Zachary Quinto, Noah Gray Cabey and Producer Jeph Loeb when they dropped into Toronto during the recent HEROES WORLD TOUR.

First things first [focusing on Zachary Quinto]. You’re essentially one pretty evil serial killer. Do you find it at all weird that so many fans have fallen in love with your character?
Zachary Quinto: I think it’s interesting actually playing this role. First of all, being on a television  series, your character comes into people’s homes every week. There’s a real familiarity, a canvas for people’s projections, and playing a character that embodies such darkness as this one does, some of the projections that tend to land on me can be on the darker side. We’ve all experienced it with S-Army

The S-Army is exactly was I was getting at.
Zachary Quinto: That kind of stuff, the degree of fanaticism is sometimes overwhelming, but it’s not creepy. My boundaries are clear with it, in terms of how I relate to it in my personal life, and when I’m in situations like we were in in New York at the signing, and like we’ll be in tomorrow at Dundas Square [in Toronto]. It’s a great opportunity to be able to connect with and engage with the people that are responsible for the success of the show, and thereby my success. So it’s anything but creepy actually, I’m really gratified, and sort of humbled by it.

Jeph Loeb: With all of our actors, we’ve been extraordinarily… well either lucky or talented. We tend to think we’re lucky. That the group of actors we’ve been able to bring in, whether it is the way that Noah plays Micah, or whether it is the way Zach plays Sylar, they bring a humanity to whatever it is they’re doing. I talk to a lot of the woman who are obsessed with Syler and with Zach, and they honestly believe that he can be saved.

I sort of compare him to Snape, if you’re familiar with the world of HARRY POTTER.
Jeph Loeb: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, they really want him to turn good and somehow turn back on all of the stuff that happened, but we live in a very complex world. Both good and evil are not black and white, there’s lot of gray and a lot of morality issues that nobody really understands. So by introducing him the way we did, by showing him that he was the watchmaker’s son and his name was Gabriel and it wasn’t that he was the Sylar character, that was something that he took on. People believe that there is redemption for him. And had we gone a different way, had we gone a more traditional way of a big huge hulking guy with razor sharp teeth and was a monster, people would have been more than happy to have him killed and that would be the end of it. And that’s not to say that we aren’t going to go that way in Season two, because having that kind of villain is also a good way to go.

Jeph Loeb: What about you buddy [speaking to Noah Gray Cabey]? Do you like having all the people come up and talking to you and stuff?

Noah Gray Cabey: Oh yeah, it’s really interesting to see how they respond to the show with theories.

Did you ever imagine a year ago that you’d be off on a HEROES WORLD TOUR, meeting millions of fans spanning the globe?
Noah Gray Cabey: Definitely not. This time of year I was still psyched the show got picked up because I got the part when I auditioned, then the show got picked up and I was like, “Yes! This is like awesome!” But I never thought that this would go this big and have this great big following and you’d have S-Army.

Jeph Loeb: We were really lucky in the sense because as you know they only picked us up for thirteen episodes. We absolutely knew that there was a core audience that was going to respond to what it is that we were doing. The question was whether of not we could get beyond that audience, and it actually really caught us by surprise that we had that many families. Grandmas were watching the show with their kids, their dogs were watching the show because Mr Muggles was so lovely. I mean there were just different things that we could never have expected and that kind of thing really brought about the success of the show, and NBC wisely acted very quickly, and after episode three gave us a full season order, and we were the first show to get that of the entire season on every network. And that really was a vote of confidence, and people started to catch on to it, and the media’s sort of catching on to it and somewhere in there, ‘Save the Cheerleader’ came along and you just couldn’t have expected any of those things along the way, it just became.

Are you at all concerned about over-hyping the show? Every week this summer, there’s seems to be a huge announcement, David Anders, Kristen Bell, Kevin Smith…
Jeph Loeb: Are we really over-hyped? I actually live in a different world because I’m the one who’s sitting there all the time going “where are the billboards? Where’s the bus?” I watch television, I haven’t seen the ads. So the show is what it is, and our job is to do the best story-telling that we can. And we can yell from the rooftops that people should watch the show, the truth is people are going to watch the first three episodes and after that they’ll decide on the show, but it’s up to whatever it is they thought they saw last year. We think it is, and we hope that everyone agrees with us.

Zachary Quinto: And it’s also like the minute you open yourself up to that kind of attention or the opinions of the viewers and the people, you don’t have any control over that. You don’t have any hand in it, and it jeopardizes the integrity of what got us to where we are in the first place. And I think that everybody is of the same mind, which is nobody’s taking anything for granted, everybody’s working as hard if not harder this season than they were last season, and those are the things that we have control over. As long as those are the things we stay connected to and we sort of allign ourselves with as we move forward, then that’s all we can ask of each other and ourselves, and what happens beyond that, that’s going to happen regardless of our wishes.

Jeph Loeb: And in the same kind of way, the pilot was constructed in a very unique way, you met people in the middle of a crisis. Niki’s door was getting knocked down, so she had to grab Micah, run out the back door. That’s how we’re going to reintroduce our characters, and as Zach was saying earlier, none of our actors, none of characters, when you come back, you find them in the same place they were before. And so what our hope is, if you’re never seen the show before, that you’ll be able to come to it and enjoy it, or if you’ve just watched the DVD, you’ll be able to come to come to enjoy it, or if you’ve been a huge fan, welcome back. But you should know there’s new stories and new characters, and new situations, that hopefully provoke all the same questions that you have before, which is..”what happened to his power? Why does he have a different power? Why is he doing that? Why is she in a completely different relationship than she was before? What happened during those mysterious four months, in between where the last show ended, and the new one begins. And again, because our show really believes that you don’t just smell smoke and not get fire, in episode 8, which is called “Four Months Ago”, goes back, right to the plaza at the very end, and we’ll take you forward and explain to you where some of these people have been and what happened.

Check back next Monday for part two of the interview and be sure to tune into HEROES tonight at 9PM on NBC and Global TV [in Canada]

Having just got off the phone with our favorite Canadian television network GLOBAL TV — have we got some exciting news to share!

Tomorrow, the TV Addict has just been invited to a HEROES press junket where I’ll have the fantastic opportunity to conduct five one-on-one interviews with HEREOS stars Zachary Quinto (Sylar), James Kyson Lee (Ando), Noah Gray-Cabey (Micah), Dania Ramirez (Maya) and executive producer Jeph Loeb.

Needless to say, I’d love to be prepared with some fantastic HEREOS questions. So post away and be sure to include who your question’s for.