Almost 2,500 people packed the Beacon Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side earlier this month to hear a French vampire sing songs with titles like “Brutal Love” and “Butterscotch Bitch.”
The bloodsucker at the mic in a sparkly black tank top was the Australian actor Sam Reid, performing as Lestat de Lioncourt. The character is the pretty boy namesake of “The Vampire Lestat,” the darkly comic horror series originally called “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire.” The new season, the show’s third, is now airing on AMC and AMC+.
Two days after the concert, over coffee at an Upper West Side hotel, Reid, 39, came across as the soft-spoken opposite of his swaggering stage persona. He talked quietly about how thrilling it was to give the kind of louche performance he could hardly have imagined as a boy growing up on a cattle farm in rural New South Wales, Australia.
He also sounded spent — by the demands of a press tour and by how fame has changed his life since “Interview With the Vampire” premiered in 2022. Gone are the days when he and his co-star Jacob Anderson, who plays his vampire lover Louis de Pointe du Lac, could walk down a Manhattan street unnoticed.
“Now you have to apologize because you physically can’t get to every person,” Reid said. “As the show reaches more of an audience and becomes more swept up in its own chaos, we lose more of those quieter times outside of it.”
Like the Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant pop-ups that had “Breaking Bad” fans in a frenzy, Reid’s concert was marketing gold for AMC. It was a reality-meets-fantasy introduction to the latest season of the longest-running series in the “Immortal Universe,” the network’s name for its franchise of Rice adaptations, which include “The Mayfair Witches” and the canceled “Talamasca: The Secret Order.”
Considering the extent to which “The Vampire Lestat” has pivoted from its first two seasons as “Interview With the Vampire,” the buzzy concert was a kind of rebranding launch event. AMC has also released several original songs from the new season and a cover of Billy Idol’s 1981 hit “Dancing With Myself,” all sung by Reid.
The show’s original incarnation, based on the 1976 first novel in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, focused considerably on Louis — on his rocky romance with Lestat, on his relationship with the vampire Armand (Assad Zaman) and on his interviews with the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian).
“The Vampire Lestat,” named for the second Vampire Chronicles novel and set in modern-day America, centers the title immortal, played by Reid as a still-horny, still-savagely bloodthirsty rocker with the commanding stage presence of “Lust for Life”-era Iggy Pop, the creamy baritone of David Sylvian and the crippling self-doubt of Kurt Cobain.
Louis is back this season, and so is Molloy, whom Lestat hires to make a documentary about Lestat’s three-century life. Lives, really: Like the novel, the show jumps between Lestat’s North American concert tour and flashbacks to his upbringing in 18th-century France.
This isn’t Reid’s first stint as a professional singer. In 2017, he appeared on London’s West End in a production of “Girl From the North Country,” a musical built around Bob Dylan songs.
But the ballads and bangers in “The Vampire Lestat,” written by the composer Daniel Hart, are neither Dylan nor show-tune in nature. Reid said he took on a rigorous regimen of vocal conditioning to fit Lestat’s songs into the scream territory of his range. To finesse the kind of stage presence he wanted, he studied videos of David Bowie peacocking as Ziggy Stardust.
Going into the season, Reid was confident that LeStans and LeSluts (as fans of the series call themselves) would appreciate the new belter Lestat. Reid definitely did — he grew up with a passion for singing and was eager to do more of it in an acting context. Initially, however, he was less sure about the series’s big swerve.
“It’s very scary when you’re getting this material coming in,” he said, “thinking, Oh my God, I don’t know if we’re going to lose our entire audience.”
Rolin Jones, the showrunner, likened the progression and name change for Season 3 to those of another popular saga.
“It was called ‘Star Wars,’ and then it was called ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’” he said. “Nobody’s going to be fumbling around like, What’s this new show?” AMC hasn’t announced a fourth season, but Jones said “it’s trending that way.” (AMC’s “Lestat” comprises the whole source novel; the next novel in Rice’s series is “The Queen of the Damned.”)
Jones said he knew the third season “might not be everybody’s bag,” calling the overhaul “a little wily, a little woolly, a little contradictory.” (Critics have been mostly positive so far, praising the show’s musical maximalism with descriptions like “brilliantly chaotic” and “gloriously glam.”)
But Jones had zero doubts about Reid’s rock star turn, calling it “an iconic American performance” that ranks with those of actors who disappeared into earlier roles, like James Gandolfini in “The Sopranos” and Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad.”
“What I see a lot of times are boring, cowardly performances in people who could do more but are in fear of looking weird,” Jones said. “On this show, especially in Sam, everything is go for it, or go for it and fail.”
“There will not be a performance like this this year on television,” he added. “He’s won it. It’s done.”
Reid grew up spending time alone on his father’s cattle farm, where he was drawn to dark entertainments (he made his own stage blood) and the psychology of monsters (he read Rice along with Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley).
After graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he started making films and television, including playing John Glenn in the 2015 ABC series “The Astronaut Wives Club.” His fame grew in Australia after roles as a priest in the 2019 TV mini-series “Lambs of God” and an ambitious producer in the early 2020s journalism drama “The Newsreader,” which is streaming on AMC+. (Reid is dating his “Newsreader” cast mate Philippa Northeast.)
Reid has lately been back in Australia (and back in a priest collar) rehearsing a new production of the Pulitzer-winning play “Doubt: A Parable,” by John Patrick Shanley. Reid stars as Father Flynn, a no-nonsense Bronx clergyman who clashes with a nun who suspects him of improper relations with a young boy. (The show runs June 30 to Aug. 2 at the Sydney Theater Company.) He said he was eager to get back onstage after spending “10 years doing film and television solely.”
“What you don’t get out of that is a beginning-to-end arc,” he said. In theater, “we build it and build it and build it, and we get to live in it. That’s what I like to do.”
Mitchell Butel, the theater company’s artistic director, said Reid’s outward shyness belies the swagger underneath. “You see Sam perform and there’s this sense of mystery, plus this incredible sensitivity and confidence and gravitas,” he said.
While Reid’s two current characters, vampire and priest, sit on opposite ends of the spiritual spectrum, each confronts profound moral questions — about everlastingness and regret in “The Vampire Lestat” and about faith and conviction in “Doubt.” The actor has spent plenty of time pondering both “the boredom of living forever” and the repression of withholding “all the experiences of life for the potential promise of an afterlife that nobody’s been able to concretely prove,” he said.
So maybe it’s no surprise that he seemed happiest talking about a less existential kind of messiness: The man misses dirt.
“I spent a lot of time out in the country when I was a kid and continue to do that and really find that to be the best experience,” he said. “When I’m not working, it’s just about going back there and helping dad on the farm.”
“Being able to see things physically grow,” he added, “is just so much more gratifying than always pursuing this ephemeral career.”
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