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] 
