"Do you think you'll ever be cast as someone less than intelligent? Someone thoroughly clueless?"
Quinto chuckles at that. At 34, he hasn't always played brainiacs. Take What's Your Number? in which he had an opening-scene cameo as the feckless beau the heroine (Anna Faris) kicks out.
"I was so not the smart guy in that movie."
As if to give the lie to that image, Quinto peppers his speech with the words "totally" and "man." But he owns that pigeonhole the film business is building for him.
"Sure, man, I'm totally OK with being 'the smart guy' in the movies. I've always been interested in being challenged by intellectually stimulating material. So if that puts me in the category of actors offered that kind of material, I'm happy."
Margin Call is a smart Wall Street exposé that doesn't so much point blame at who caused the financial meltdown of 2008 as reveal the mindsets behind it, looking into one firm that sees the end coming and must make survival decisions that have little with do with ethics, morality or human kindness.
Quinto isn't just one of the stars of this ensemble drama.
He helped build it. He and his company, BtD, Before the Door, produced it.
"I had a lot of conversations with actors directly," he says.
"I got them to meet with our writer-director [J. C. Chandor] and assuaged their fears about working with a guy that new. Kevin Spacey was the first person, after me, to sign on. You get Kevin Spacey on board, other people who were maybe considering doing the film become convinced to do the film. He paved the way for others, like Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore and Simon Baker."
Smart, but then, we'd expect nothing less. Quinto had kicked around doing bit parts for TV for a few years after finishing the Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama until landing a role in the hit sci-fi series Heroes. That led to the role as Spock in J. J. Abrams relaunch of the Star Trek film franchise.
"Starting my production company is something that Star Trek allowed me to do," he says.
"I could utilise that exposure and parlay it into opportunities that would allow me to tell my own kind of stories instead of stories other people see me in. It's all tied into Star Trek. It put me in a position to have access that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I wanted to use that access to tell my own sorts of stories, with me involved in telling them."
Margin Call, with its moral ambiguity, intrigued him.
"Nobody really gets raked over the coals, nobody is lionised. It really just presents an exploration of the human impact that these actions had on people who were somehow responsible for the decisions. It lets the audience formulate its own opinion, maybe generating a little dialogue afterward.
"I wanted to make a movie that requires people to really invest, no pun intended, to connect with the characters as the story unfolds. It doesn't necessarily do the work for you. That's something I value as a storyteller and as someone who goes to see stories told, I like when my participation, my close attention, is required."
