🩸 The Beautiful Unwell 🩸

SAM REID & JACOB ANDERSON behind the scenes during their shoot with Entertaintment Weekly

Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson have a habit of finishing each other’s sentences.

It’s a bright spring morning in New York, a few weeks ahead of the highly anticipated third season of their hit show Interview With the Vampire—officially retitled The Vampire Lestat—and we’re making our way down the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraling ramp. We stop in front of a looming, crumpled steel structure by Carol Bove, as Reid is reflecting on the show’s script.

“Just to reference the artwork—it feels a bit like this, where it looks very soft, sort of delicate,” he says, gesturing to the sculpture. “And then it’s obviously made from such a hard steel structure. It looks like it’s something that you want to eat and cuddle into, but you also know that it would be quite painful to touch and lean into it, like a—”

“Like a dagger,” Anderson supplies.

“Yeah,” agrees Reid. “It’s sort of amazing. You wouldn’t—”

“You wouldn’t want it to fall on you,” Anderson says.

Meanwhile, when Anderson trails off toward the end of his sentences to gather his thoughts, Reid, as if reading his mind, supplies the words he was searching for (and asks follow-up questions so good I have half a mind to wonder if he’s angling for a side hustle in journalism).

They’re like this for the entirety of our time together: a pair so in sync that I’m not sure they’re even aware of it, the twins from The Shining if they were men in their 30s who don’t resemble each other at all.