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.