Brilliant Minds' Zachary Quinto Initially Struggled to Understand This About Oliver Sacks
Zachary Quinto plays a dramatized version of real-life Dr. Oliver Sacks. He revealed the thing he struggled to understand about the man.
Zachary Quinto has been vocal about his excitement over bringing the life and work of acclaimed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks to the spotlight in the NBC drama Brilliant Minds. However, there was one surprising aspect of Sacks’ life that Quinto revealed he was particularly excited to explore with his character, Dr. Wolf, in the show’s modern setting.
Those who have been tuning into Brilliant Minds will know that Dr. Wolf is an out and proud gay man. In fact, he even jokes about how common it is to see gay men identifying as such openly in 2024. However, when it comes to the real-life Dr. Sacks, who lived from 1933 to 2015, that was far from the case.
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“He had a very complicated relationship with his own sexuality,” Quinto explained in a recent interview with NBC Insider. “He was actually celibate for 35 years of his life. And I couldn’t really understand when I learned that, what would motivate someone to make that decision. And then, I really came to see that Oliver Sacks lived and worked in a time when identifying as a gay man was essentially a singular issue that defined somebody and prevented them from fully experiencing their life or their work.”
He continued: “And so, I think he realized that coming to terms with that aspect of himself would have prevented him from making the singular contributions to the field of neurology that he was uniquely designed to make. And I think in service of his vocation and in service of his patients, he decided to keep that part of himself separate, locked away.”
Indeed, when Sacks’ name comes up in medical circles, his sexuality is typically not at the forefront of the conversation. Instead, it’s his collection of bewildering case studies of patients with rare and complicated neurological conditions, a testament to the work and legacy he left behind.
His insightful and empathetic approach to patient-first medical treatment allowed him to catalog these cases into works that have since gone on to be made into well-known movies like At First Sight (1999) or Awakenings (1990), as well as the nonfiction books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), Hallucinations (2012), and The River of Consciousness (2017). Many of Sacks' case studies are dramatized on Brilliant Minds.
However, Quinto was enamored with the idea of depicting Oliver Sacks’ life in the modern day, an era when his sexuality would not have created such a barrier to his work and acclaim.
“[Brilliant Minds] really is an opportunity to explore what would it have been like if Oliver Sacks had been born a generation or two later. And how would his identity as a gay man have factored into his relationships with his patients, his relationships with other doctors?” Quinto said.
While he is proud to play a successful, heroic gay man on television, he also recognizes how important it is for Dr. Wolf's sexuality to be merely a factor in his life and not always at the forefront of it as it would have been for Sacks.
“I really love that we get to bring that storyline into the show and to do it subtly and to do it where it’s not what it’s all about, but it’s one part of what it’s about. And I think that’s a real reflection of the progress we’ve made,” Quinto concluded. “The accomplishments we’ve made as a culture and as a society in the years since Oliver Sacks was working.”
Watch Brilliant Minds Mondays at 10/9c on NBC and streaming next-day on Peacock.
