When the uncompromising American writer Gore Vidal had people over for dinner, he would often put on old tapes of his televised debates with conservative William F Buckley. Deep into his old age, he would sit his guests down with a drink and watch, obsessively, the recordings of his own, younger face. Recently, Zachary Quinto has taken to watching them obsessively, too.
The 45-year-old actor and staunch Democrat is best known for playing Spock in the most recent Star Trek films. Now, he’s stepped into the role of the “authentic, immovable, complex” Vidal in the West End transfer of James Graham’s Best of Enemies, opposite David Harewood as Buckley.
Based on the 2015 documentary by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, the award-winning play throws us into Buckley and Vidal’s snarling, twisting 1968 debates, which “irrevocably changed the future of what news became”, Quinto says. What was previously neutral and strictly factual was transformed into witty, ruthless conversation, skewed by personal opinion. Commenting nightly on the Republican and Democratic national conventions, Buckley and Vidal’s sparring became a sensation.
With slicked-back hair and square glasses, Quinto is impeccably put together for his second day of rehearsals in London. Having enjoyed competitive high-school debating, though claiming to remember few of the skills, he does not um or er when he speaks, and his unwavering gaze is given extra authority by his defining eyebrows.
But the performer, who recently appeared in revivals of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Boys in the Band, admits he is still finding his feet in his latest role. The West End production of Best of Enemies follows a sold-out run at the Young Vic, where Quinto’s role was played by the British actor Charles Edwards. “I’ve never stepped into something which already had a production,” he says, tugging down the buttoned-up sleeves of his shirt. The cast and crew previously had a week’s rehearsal in New York, but everything still feels new in London. The experience is akin, he says, to being the new kid in class, when everyone else started the term before.
Quinto has often played grisly antagonists on TV and film, including multiple serial killers, from the superpower-stealing Sylar in science-fiction series Heroes to the terrifying Dr Oliver Thredson in the freakish anthology American Horror Story, which bagged him an Emmy nomination. But he considers theatre his calling, and has long been vocal about wanting to perform in the West End. “I’ve wanted to live and work in London for a really long time,” he says eagerly. “I’ve seen so much great theatre here over the years. To have the opportunity to make theatre here is really exciting.”
A decade before Quinto was born, 1968 was a turning point for the US. Among increasingly frequent protests and sharpening divides of political thought, it was the first time the political parties’ nominating conventions had been shown on TV in full colour. Against the newsrooms with bigger budgets and audiences, ABC – “the fledgling channel”, Quinto points out – wanted to find a way to increase its meagre ratings. Rather than sticking a camera in front of the event and reporting on it neutrally, ABC chose to feature two political commentators going head to head after each day.
Pitting Buckley and Vidal against each other was an immediate success. “You have to remember,” Quinto says, “there weren’t dozens of channels when you flipped on your television. People only had three options. On CBS or NBC you’re seeing what you’ve always seen. Then you flip to ABC and you’re seeing two people expressing their own, diametrically opposed points of view.” They were two prizefighters in a ring. “You want to see which one will win.”
Quinto talks about Vidal and Buckley as if they are rare birds of prey, beautiful and vicious at once. “They were more impressive than many of the politicians of the day who were on script,” he says. “Their verbal acrobatics set them apart.”
Vidal’s refusal to bow to the mainstream was part of what drew Quinto to the character. The author famously said it was as natural to be homosexual as it was to be heterosexual, a quote Quinto beams at and says he loves. “He had a very complex relationship with relationships,” he says thoughtfully. “He suffered a great loss young in his life, when a boy he opened his heart to was killed in the [second world] war. I think it calcified him in a way.”
In a particularly impassioned moment in the debates, Vidal lashes out at Buckley, calling him a “crypto-Nazi”, and Buckley, taken aback, calls Vidal “a queer”. “The word ‘queer’ has been reclaimed,” says Quinto, who first spoke publicly about being gay in the early 2010s, “but in 1968, this is just before the Stonewall riots, just before the gay liberation movement really exploded. To come out and say it,” – he falters, considering the impact – “I think it’s a moment neither of them really got over for the rest of their lives.” The attack, uncharacteristically impulsive, hit Buckley harder than Vidal. “I think Buckley considered the moment one of the greatest failures of his professional life. But Vidal, if you watch it, he smiles. I think he saw it as a win.” The country was scandalised, but Vidal delighted in scandal. “He knew the fire they were playing with.”
That fire was what made these debates so – Quinto growls a low, slow hum, finding the right word – “dynamic”. But their ferocity and brazen nature of them trickled into the mainstream. “News used to be an objective and impartial expression of events,” Quinto considers. “It has become this quagmire of echo chambers, ideological culture wars and opinions that, in many ways, you can trace back to these debates. It was the birth of ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, and there is no other way of seeing it’. That polarisation has only intensified in the last 50 years.”
Looking at our current political situation, he identifies a kind of absence. “I think we’ve lost a grace of communication in the modern world,” he says. “Social media has chipped away at it, and the formation of partisan news channels has lowered the bar for how to talk to one another. We’ve lost respect for one another, in many ways.”
Growing up, Quinto was surrounded by active involvement in politics. His mum took part in local politics in their small town in Pittsburgh, his great-grandfather was on the city council, and his grandfather had been in Congress. As an adult, Quinto canvassed for Barack Obama in both elections, manning the phones at Obama’s campaign headquarters and stumping round the country for him.
Since then, however, the actor has found it increasingly difficult to find hope in politics. “I have lost a certain faith in our democratic system, to be honest,” he leans back in his chair, resigned. “It’s been pretty bleak in our country.” He waves a hand out the window. “I’m sure many people here can relate. It feels like the pendulum has swung so far in one direction and it’s happening in a global sweep. I don’t know if or how we can repair the damage that’s been done any time soon.”
But this despair was part of what drew him to Best of Enemies, with its caustic intelligence and forceful insistence that talking to people with opposing views is education as well as entertainment. “There is a kernel of hope in the repetition of history,” Quinto says determinedly. “As years, 1968 and 2022 are similar in certain ways, right? There was a tremendous social upheaval then, as there is now. One of the things that emerged from that time was radical new thought. I think that’s possible now as well.”
Vidal once wrote that change is both the nature of life, and its hope. Looking ahead, Quinto clings to something similar. “I hope it can take us in some kind of salvageable direction.”
Best of Enemies is at the Noël Coward theatre, London, from Monday 14 November until 18 February.
