Exclusive: Sam Reid had just hit a new peak of Hollywood fame when an unlikely job offer hit his proverbial desk and brought him home to Sydney, Australia.
The 39-year-old actor – best known for The Newsreader, Interview with the Vampire, and The Vampire Lestat – hadn’t even auditioned for the part he was being offered, but knew he couldn’t turn it down.
Australian actor Sam Reid was riding the high of his success in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ and ‘The Vampire Lestat’ when he got a job offer he couldn’t refuse. Marleen Moise
After all, one famous Aussie Sam had already stepped away from the gig.
“I didn’t really audition, but I probably should have,” Reid tells nine.com.au in a quiet corner at Roslyn Packer Theatre.
“I just felt like it was one of those things that I couldn’t not do.”
He’s dressed down in a black shirt and jeans for our chat, but in a few hours’ time Reid will take to the stage in full religious garb to play Father Flynn in Sydney Theatre Company’s revival of Doubt: A Parable.
The part was originally bestowed upon Sam Worthington but when he withdrew for personal reasons, Reid was asked to step in.
There were just two problems.
First, Reid had already committed to the press tour for The Vampire Lestat, the hit series that has taken over TikTok and won Reid an army of fans around the globe.
Second, that press tour would require him to be on the other side of the planet during rehearsals for Doubt.
Rather than miss out on Reid, Sydney Theatre Company reorganised the entire production’s schedule around his work in the US.
Having now witnessed the craze that followed him home to Australia – like lines of fans waiting to meet him outside the theatre every night – it’s easy to see why.
Have you got a story? Contact reporter Maddison Skipper: mskipper@nine.com.au
Sydney schoolboy to Hollywood heartthrob
Raised on a cattle farm outside Canberra, Reid attended Cranbrook School in Sydney and made his TV debut in All Saints before moving to London.
Since then, he’s played everything a news presenter (The Newsroom), a priest (Lambs of God), Prince Harry (The Taking of Prince Harry), and even appeared in the music video for Flume’s hit tack Never Be Like You.
But it was a vampire from the ’70s that finally shot him to international fame.
Originally a side character, Reid’s Lestat takes centre stage in The Vampire Lestat, which is currently airing on AMC+. Sophie Giraud/AMC
In 2021, Reid was cast as Lestat de Lioncourt in AMC’s Interview With The Vampire, based on Anne Rice’ The Vampire Chronicles novels.
The series was a hit and its third season was renamed The Vampire Lestat to reflect Reid’s new role the leading man, a change many fans welcomed.
The cult following Reid has amassed as Lestat has inspired fans to start social media accounts dedicated to his career and tattoo his famous lines on their skin.
No one expected him to follow up that kind of success with a stint in Aussie theatre.
“In film and television, often you’re on a much faster time frame. You only have one or two takes a lot of the time,” Reid says.
Doubt has given him the chance to finally slow down and really live in a role.
As Father Flynn, Reid has to plead his innocence while still planting little seeds of doubt in the audience’s mind each night. Sydney Theatre Company
“In the theatre, every night you come back and you have the opportunity to explore it again,” he says.
“You have a lot more time to discover things and allow tangents to unfold. It’s much more of a slow process.”
It’s been a welcome change of gears for Reid and the fans have followed him, some travelling interstate or overseas just to see him on stage.
One told nine.com.au she travelled from the US to Sydney for 48 hours just to attend two back-to-back performances of Doubt; such is the dedication Reid inspires.
Fresh star power for Australia’s theatre sector
Doubt is Reid’s Sydney Theatre Company debut and his first live theatre outing in close to a decade. It couldn’t come at a more precarious time for the sector.
Beetlejuice: The Musical and Waitress both cut their national tours short last month, and Anastasia: The Musical has been quietly cancelling shows as the industry buckles under the weight of high costs and poor ticket sales.
Global economic upheaval and Australia’s cost-of-living crisis have put the arts in a precarious position as audiences are forced to cut down on discretionary spending.
But they’re not giving up on theatre – they’re just being more selective about the shows they’re willing to pay to see.
“The experience of being in an actual room and having a story told to you is like no other experience,” Reid says.
“People crave it more than they might have before because we’re living in a time now where we have so much interface in front of us all the time.
“I feel like the theatre and live performance is going to become more and more vital, particularly as we enter this age of artificial intelligence.”
His own star power is also drawing in new audiences for Doubt, especially Gen Z’s and Millennials who otherwise might have skipped a stage drama about sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic Church in 1960s New York.
The power of a 2004 story in the TikTok age
Written by American playwright John Patrick Shanley in 2004, Doubt follows stern Catholic school headmistress Sister Aloysius as she accuses Father Flynn of sexually abusing the school’s only Black student.
Reid – pictured here with Pamela Rabe as Sister Aloysius and Shannen Alyce Quan – is confident Australia’s theatre sector will only become more vital in the years ahead. Sydney Theatre Company
American playwright John Patrick Shanley left the ending intentionally ambiguous, forcing audiences to question where the truth really lies.
Even Reid doesn’t know if Father Flynn “did it”, and that’s the point.
“There’s a lot of preconceived notions about the Catholic Church when you come in to watch a play about sexual assault within the Catholic Church,” he says.
“What the play is doing, is saying: ‘Don’t forget to question what you’re seeing. It’s absolutely OK to not know. It’s OK to not have an answer.’”
Though the play was written more than 20 years ago, its message is particularly relevant today.
“The internet today encourages people to have concrete perceptions,” Reid says.
Though Doubt: A Parable was written two decades ago, its star believes its just as relevant to a 2026 audience. Sam Mooy
“There are algorithms that actively work with the audience’s sense of outrage, and so the more outrageous the post, the more aggressive the response, the higher it gets pushed up the algorithm.”
The result is a feedback loop of online outrage in which empathy and nuance are afterthoughts, and having a strongly held conviction is often mistaken for being objectively or morally correct.
Doubt is a cautionary tale about what can happen when that goes too far.
Doubt: A Parable is now showing at Roslyn Packer Theatre, with the season scheduled to run until August 2.