On film Sam Reid has mostly been the officer at the edge of the frame, correct and hard to read. Television gave him space, and the parts got bigger, stranger and louder.
Fi1m perspective
In '71 (2014) Sam Reid is Lt. Armitage, one of the officers around Jack O'Connell's Hook, and the useful thing about him is that we could not decide whether to trust him. Yann Demange sets him beside Sean Harris's Captain Browning, and between them they make the film's quiet point that rank is a poor guide to how much a man understands or how safe he is to be near. Gregory Burke makes room for divided loyalties, so nobody can be sorted into the right camp at a glance. We watched Reid for the whole film waiting to learn whose side he was really on, and the not knowing kept us tenser than several of the chases did.
That is the sort of part film gave him for a decade. Trained at LAMDA and out in 2010, he took a credited part in Anonymous (2011) and then worked his way through the supporting ranks of British period pictures: John Davinier in Belle (2013) for Amma Asante, The Railway Man (2013), The Riot Club (2014), '71 the same year. By Waiting for the Barbarians (2019) he was The Lieutenant in Ciro Guerra's film of the Coetzee novel, which we found grave, handsome and too busy being a parable to be a story, and which Mark Rylance carries almost alone. We did not single Reid out in it. That is not a complaint; it is what the part was.
The turn came at home. Lambs of God (2019) gave him a lead, Father Ignatius Jones in a gothic Australian miniseries, and The Newsreader (2021–2025) gave him Dale Jennings, an ambitious, closeted presenter in a 1980s Australian newsroom, opposite Anna Torv for three seasons. He has said of it: "For the first time, I really had a big character to explore in Australia, with my own accent." Then, from 2022, Lestat de Lioncourt in Interview with the Vampire, opposite Jacob Anderson's Louis, a part that grew until the third season (2026) took its name, The Vampire Lestat.
We have not reviewed the television and will not pretend to a verdict on it here. What the reputation describes, though, is recognisable from Armitage: a man holding a great deal in and unsure how much is showing. Dale Jennings, by all accounts, is that man in a suit, policing himself in front of a camera; Lestat is the same man with the lid off, and singing. Most critics have found nothing to hold against him in any of it, which we suspect says as much about the parts as the actor. In the two films we have, he was reliable and unremarkable, and nothing in either predicts the flamboyance the vampire is said to have drawn out.
If you know him from Lestat and go looking for the same in his films, you will find a lieutenant standing quietly at the edge of someone else's story. See '71, which is a good film regardless of him, and look to the television for the man himself.
Biography
Sam Reid is an Australian actor born on 19 February 1987 in New South Wales. He was raised on a cattle property in the Monaro region and attended Cranbrook School in Sydney. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), graduating in 2010 as the star student of his year.
Reid is best known for his role as Lestat de Lioncourt in the AMC series Interview with the Vampire (2022–present), for which he received a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination. His film credits include Lt. Armitage in '71 (2014), John Davinier in Belle (2013), Hugo Fraser-Tyrwhitt in The Riot Club (2014) and Young Finlay in The Railway Man (2013). On television he has led The Newsreader (2021–2025) and Lambs of God (2019), earning four AACTA Award nominations. His older brother, Rupert Reid, is also an actor.
