I don’t think I’ve talked about this before: I love that AOS Spock is fast. He’s so fucking speedy. In TOS, Nimoy’s Spock doesn’t run unless he has to; he’s awkward and gangly and whenever he does try to get anywhere fast it looks like he hasn’t had much practice at it. He has no form; he runs like he isn’t comfortable in his own body and he stops–awkwardly, with lots of arm-flapping–the second it’s safe to do so.
But Quinto’s Spock sprints EVERYWHERE like he’s anchoring a relay. Between decks, through San Fransisco, across the bridge, he doesn’t care, why should being composed mean he has to be slow. In Beyond he gets stabbed almost in the heart by a piece of rusty metal and Bones is still having to scramble after him, yelling at him to slow down.
I like this partly because it means AOS Spock is more secure in his body and party because Spock is generally a very deferential person and it’s fun to see this one area where even people who outrank him can be gasping at him to slow down and he’s sprinting away like OR YOU COULD KEEP UP MOTHAFUCKAS
I’ve always thought that the one physical advantage Quinto had over Nimoy is that Quinto can run and Nimoy just couldn’t! Bless him.
It’s true.
Quinto had training for the scenes in which Spock runs. Here’s a bit of the transcript from when he was on Conan:
ZACHARY QUINTO: I had to sprint a lot.
So there was a lot of sprint training as well which seems that it would be easy but it’s actually not.
CONAN: What I’ve always heard is true is when you think you’re running cool – like you’re cool running in real life, when they shoot it and show it back to you, it looks horrible.
ZACHARY QUINTO: I was like I got this.
Maybe we should tape you and show you how you actually look.
Which they did and I was like, I don’t – I don’t got this.