Zachary Quinto Hasn't Read 'Brilliant Minds' Reviews, Explains Why He Stopped Reading Them
Zachary Quinto is opening up about his decision to stop reading reviews for his projects, including the new NBC series Brilliant Minds.
The 47-year-old actor chatted about his stance on reviews during an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Spotlight with Jessica Shaw.
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Zachary stopped reading reviews when he was performing in a play in London recently.
“I was doing a play in London two years ago, and I decided to take an experiment because it’s the first time I’d worked in London and I didn’t know a lot of people in the theater world there, and so I just decided that I wasn’t going to avail myself of any of the reviews of that play,” Zachary said.
He continued, “And so I never did, and it was the most enjoyable experience I had doing a play to that point because it was not in any way infiltrated by opinions of other people and I was able to preserve my own experience of doing the play and not have any adjectives rattling around in my head, be they positive or negative.”
“I’ve always had the idea of reviews that if you believe the good ones, you gotta believe the bad ones and no matter how glowing a review might be or how eviscerating a review might be, it’s always going to be reductive,” Zachary continued. “It’s always gonna be reduced down to the opinion of one person, the subjective experience of one person, and then further curtailed by, you know, how much room they have in the article that they’re writing, so you know, maybe you get a paragraph, but more often than not, you get a sentence or a parenthetical adjective or two to distill a performance that has taken months to craft and is the culmination of a lot of investment creatively on the part of the artist who’s shaping that performance, so why? Where is the benefit for the artist in that? I just don’t see it.”
Zachary hasn’t read the reviews for Brilliant Minds. The show currently has a 63% on Rotten Tomatoes.
“It took me 20 years to get to that place, but when I had that experience with the play, I was like, ‘I’ll never read another review again. Ever,’ and so with Brilliant Minds, I haven’t, and it’s been so liberating,” he said. “It allows me to have these kinds of conversations without any context for somebody that thinks that I’m surprisingly versatile or, you know, but I’m very open to the experience that people are having of the show and when I meet people that have watched it, and I talk to people, that is fulfilling for me, you know? My loved ones and friends who watch the show and have opinions about it, I’m really interested in that, but when it comes to, you know, a critical perspective on it, I’m just not interested anymore, so yeah.”
Watch the interview below!