Sam Reid
Sam Reid is an actor, born 1987.
For roughly a decade Sam Reid was the well-bred young man in other people's period films. Born in New South Wales in 1987, he arrived through British costume drama and stayed there: the Earl of Essex in Anonymous, young Finlay in The Railway Man, John Davinier in Belle, Hugo Fraser-Tyrwhitt in The Riot Club, Lieutenant Armitage in 71, John Cree in The Limehouse Golem. Handsome, articulate, frequently in a uniform or a cravat, and rarely given the centre of the frame.
Australia gave him better material. Lambs of God and The Newsreader brought him four AACTA nominations between them, and Dale Jennings in The Newsreader is the performance that shows what he had been holding back: a man managing an enormous amount of interior life while reading the news in a suit, which is a very hard thing to make legible on camera.
Then came Lestat de Lioncourt. Interview with the Vampire handed him a character a great many readers had been imagining for decades, and instead of playing the seductive surface he plays the pettiness, the boredom and the appetite for being adored, a reading that earned him a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination. It is now the defining role, and The Vampire Lestat continues it in 2026.
Movies (11)
TV (9)
Where to start with Sam Reid
Interview with the Vampire happens to be both the obvious choice and the right one, because it is the only thing here that uses everything he can do: the charm, the cruelty, the singing, and a willingness to be genuinely unlikeable for episodes at a time. Start at the beginning and give it a full season.
If you would rather have the quiet version, The Newsreader is arguably the better piece of television, a newsroom drama in which his performance is built almost entirely out of what he does not say.
For the earlier work, Belle and The Riot Club are the two best period films on the list and pull in opposite directions, one about principle and one about privilege at its ugliest. '71 is the tense one, Lambs of God the strangest, and The Vampire Lestat is what comes next.