BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — The first season of the NBC medical drama “Brilliant Minds” found a compelling blend of mysterious ailments with the angst and personal turmoil of the entire staff. No one suffered through more problems than Zachary Quinto’s character of Dr. Oliver Wolf from dealing with the optical condition prosopagnosia, better known as face blindness, to meeting the father he thought died 30 years ago.
Quinto wants to assure fans of the series – that airs 10 p.m. Mondays – there is more to come in the second season.
“We pick up season two in a really unexpected place, both physically and emotionally, for Oliver Wolf,” Quino says. “There comes with that an inherent mystery to the story.
“We kick things off from a really unexpected point of view, and then that feeds into it. That leads us up to solving that mystery in the second season.”
The series – inspired by the life and work of world-famous author and physician Oliver Sacks – follows a larger-than-life neurologist, Dr. Oliver Wolf (Quinto), and his team of interns as they explore the last great frontier – the human mind.
The blend of personal and professional woes starts in the second season opener as Dr. Wolf helps an MMA fighter with mysterious symptoms. At the same time, Dr. Pierce (Tamberla Perry), considers a career outside of Bronx General.
John Clarence Stewart, Brian Altemus, and Bellamy Young are joining the cast.
Quinto adds, “You’re definitely going to see a character who is struggling at times to maintain balance and for whom his patience really reflects back at him, his own state of consciousness, his own state of being.
“That line gets continued through the second season between the medical components of the show and the underlying emotional dynamics and psychological complexities that exist between all the characters that we know already, and the new characters that we’re going to meet this season.”
The way Quinto describes the design of “Brilliant Minds is that stories straddle an intellectual and an emotional line. The intellectual elements are rooted in the medical mysteries. He says the other is the emotional satisfaction of understanding the humanity of the people that are dealing with those mysteries.
Perry’s character is seeing how the emotional can impact the intellectual as her character has been put on leave at the same time she’s going through a divorce.
“She has a lot of new territory to navigate at the beginning of the season. We see how she’s going to do that, where she ended up, where she landed and how she’s moving forward after the divorce. So that’s going to play heavily into the opening episodes of the season,” Perry says.
“Brilliant Minds” was originally called “Dr. Wolf,” but the producers decided to change the name because there were several other shows with wolf in the name and they didn’t want any confusion. “Brilliant Minds” became the title because everyone decided that it sounded more like a medical program.
Quinto jokes that with his track record of working on sci-fi and fantasy projects viewers may have assumed he was playing a character who could change into a wolf.
“There’s this supernatural quality to roles that I’ve played in the past. And I just agree, there’s something really right about this title,” Quinto says. “It’s about the doctors on the show who are obviously brilliant and use their brilliance to help their patients, but it is also about the patients.
“These people who have minds that are unconventional. They’re maybe not the minds that they wish that they had, the brains that they wish that they had, but our doctors are teaching them how to recognize their own brilliance. And that’s something that I think is a throughline of the show, as well.”
Because “Brilliant Minds is a medical drama, the actors face the challenge of being able to rattle off technical words without pause. Before Quinto can talk about that challenge, Perry jumps in to say that Quinto arrives at work every day with his script under full control.
Quinto calls Perry’s evaluation as being very “sweet.”
“I like to know what I’m talking about as much as I can. We have a really wonderful on-set medical advisor consultant who we adore, and we have a number of doctors on our writing staff, so there’s no shortage of people that we can turn to,” Quinto says. “I find part of the joy of the character is that I’m playing somebody who has a secondhand intrinsic knowledge of what he’s saying and what it means.
“The audience doesn’t necessarily need to know the specificity of it, as long as the character does, and so I understand that assignment. And it’s something that I take to heart, as I’m learning my text. It’s fun.”
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