‘The Newsreader’: Sam Reid Looks Back on Season 1 Dale Jennings

U.S. audiences know Sam Reid as Interview With the Vampire‘s Lestat, but they’re about to meet the character he’s known for in his homeland of Australia. Reid plays Dale Jennings opposite Anna Torv‘s Helen Norville in The Newsreader, an award-winning original series from Australia’s ABC TV that first debuted in 2021. Its third and final season premieres on February 2, 2025 in Australia, but Interview With the Vampire‘s streaming home, AMC+, is bringing The Newsreader to eager fans next week as part of a new licensing agreement.

Starting Thursday, December 19 and going through January 23, Sundance Now will release one episode of The Newsreader Season 1 per week. Sundance Now titles are available to AMC+ subscribers. As of the time of publication, Sundance Now and AMC+ will only have Season 1, but Season 2 could possibly come to the streaming service in the future. (Season 1 was previously available on The Roku Channel and ARTE in English for a limited time.)

The Newsreader is set in the maelstrom of commercial television newsrooms in 1986 Australia. In Season 1, Dale is a diligent young reporter, desperate to become a newsreader. Helen is a notoriously “difficult” star newsreader determined to build credibility. After Dale is assigned to be Helen’s producer by their ill-tempered boss, Lindsay (William McInnes), an unexpected connection quickly grows, giving them a support system both in and out of the newsroom that they each desperately needed.

Paired together over three months, Dale and Helen cover an extraordinary chain of news events — from the shock of the Challenger explosion, to the hype of Halley’s Comet, to the complexities of the AIDS crisis. From messy beginnings, a deep bond is formed that upends their lives and transforms the very fabric of the nightly news bulletin.

The Newsreader is created by Michael Lucas, and every episode is directed by Emma Freeman, director of the critically acclaimed trial episode in Interview With the Vampire Season 2. Reid has been playing Dale and Lestat back to back since 2021. With The Newsreader now behind him, Reid looks back on Season 1 Dale with TV Insider.

When we first met, you had just filmed [The Newsreader] Season 2.

Sam Reid: Right.

I didn’t get to watch it until earlier this year. It was randomly on this French streaming app, and I was like, oh my God, I’m going to meet Dale Jennings. I finally did, and it was amazing. I would protect him with my life. He is so painfully awkward.

[Laughs] Yeah.

I love him so much. For those who don’t know, give us a little intro into Dale Jennings, his goals in the newsroom in Season 1, and why he connects with Helen.

Dale Jennings is an ambitious reporter who has aspirations to be a newsreader. His whole life has been centered around holding up these archetypal images of these very, very stable, strong people who are represented through these kind of almost cardboard-like newsreader figures. He’s got a lot of inner turmoil that he latches a sense of stability and a sense of calm onto these figures in the news. That’s what he aspires to be. He dreams to be this perfect person, but it turns out that the news is a very tumultuous place, and this person who he’s idolizing, Helen Norville, turns out to be a much more complicated human being than he even imagined. They connect on that level that they both use the news as a form of masking, really. I think that the news and newsreaders are really great examples of a public and private persona. In America, it’s slightly different to the UK and Australia, I think. I did actually use a lot of American newsreader references because American news is so theatrical. They’re big television spectacles.

Shouldn’t be, but it is.

Oh, I know. And I think Australia in the ’80s probably had a bit more of that because there was a lot more limited television channels, so I definitely tried to look at a lot of American newsreaders, particularly as we progressed with Dale. He becomes a bit more Americanized. But yeah, there’s this dichotomy between the public and personal persona that I think Helen and Dale really connect on because privately, they’re both absolute messes, but they have a real connection to the work. They love the work.

There’s a very romantic scene — it was probably the most romantic scene between the two of them — towards the end of Season 1 where after they’ve gotten a big story and they’re sitting on a clifftop in Darwin. They’re meant to be having this romantic date, [but] Helen just wants to work, and Dale totally sees that. He kind of says, you don’t want to sit here and have champagne with me. You just want to focus on the work. And she says, yeah. And he says, that’s OK. I get it. That’s great. That’s probably their most romantic moment, to be understood in that space that the work comes before everything else, and then they give each other the space to do it. They’re total oddballs, but I think they’re made for each other. I really feel like they’re destined to be together. [Giggles]

I get that vibe too. And he loves that she wants to focus on the work.

He loves it.

He already loved her, but he kind of falls in love with her more in that moment. He’s like, this gal, that’s exactly what I would do. He respects her so much.

Yeah, and he idolizes her. She’s so impressive, she’s so powerful, and she is also very exciting as a person to be around. She’s got a lot of control in the way that she operates, and Anna is like that as well. They just kind of walk in, they take a lot of control of the space. Incredibly generous, but they don’t take any s**t. And Dale just takes s**t all day, every day, nonstop, particularly in Season 1. [Laughs] And so it’s very aspirational, I think, to be around someone like Helen Norville.

Courtesy of Roku

Do you think they work without the work? If they didn’t both love the news, if they didn’t have that in their lives, could their relationship still work?

No, I don’t actually. I don’t think they work individually without the news, or at least they haven’t worked it out. I can’t really speak too much for Helen. That’s a whole other ballpark. But I feel like Dale hasn’t really worked out who he is. He’s only worked out who this archetype that he wants to be is. Playing that’s really fun because he’s such a mess. He’s so complicated and he’s so gangly and just trying to work out his feet outside of the news. But as soon as the news is on — oh, hang on. We’re talking about Season 1. [Laughs]

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I think he knows where he wants to be. He’s got a really strong aspiration about where he wants to be. It is very nerve-wracking for him to be able to deliver on that, and so Helen really helps him become that thing. She shows him how to wear the public persona, and she teaches him how to do it. She’s there holding his hand the whole time. She makes him this confident, powerful thing, even though he’s crumbling on the inside.

But also in turn, he makes her feel lovable. A lot of people make her feel like she’s completely unlovable.

Yeah, but he does love her. That’s the thing.

He loves her so much.

He does love her, and he loves her for all of her quirks.

A lot of people do feel like that [unlovable], and there’s a lot of quirks to Helen’s personality that are very individual to her, which Dale adores and he doesn’t make her feel bad about them. That’s who she is, he accepts her for them, and he’s never really judged her ever. They really spur each other on. They’re a really lovely couple actually. Their dynamic, everything about them, the way that he understands her and gives her space to be who she needs to be without judgment. And the same on her part.

The problem is, the more complicated their relationship becomes, the more they find out about each other, the more that is tested. That relationship becomes more and more and more tested. But particularly in Season 1, it’s really about them finding that concrete, infallible lock of a connection and trust in each other, which they definitely do by the end, but it’s a definitely tumultuous journey to get there. [Laughs]

We can’t talk too much about the rest of Season 1 or beyond because we’re doing preview here, but the [Season 1 finale] scene where he’s talking about his sexuality with her — god.

Yeah.

Courtesy of Roku

I weep every time I watch that. It’s so beautiful.

And that’s the joy of Emma Freeman. We spend a long time circling this scene. We shoot the whole show in one go, so we shoot six episodes simultaneously. It’s kind of like shooting a six-hour-long movie while we shoot it, so it’s kind of confusing because you don’t have any sense of through-line or consistency. But we kept on circling the scene. We were scheduled to shoot it, and then we thought, no, it’s not the right time. And so we really worked out the characters and spent a whole season working out who they were before we got to the actual revelation of where they show each other their true selves and what felt right. We actually shot a few different iterations of that and a few different ways to go about it until we finally landed on that one. And we just shot it once, basically.

Wow. I wish I could talk more about the finale, it’s so beautiful. But to talk about the first episode: Dale’s first update at the news desk is the most painfully funny, uncomfortable scene. I scream laughing watching it every time. Tell me how you and Emma Freeman worked together to figure out how to make that scene so viscerally funny and uncomfortable and awkward to watch.

Emma shoots the whole show. The joy of The Newsreader — and particularly working with Emma and Earle Dresner, the [director of photography’s] style for that show — is that the sets that they build are so interactive because you shoot in real film studios and real news studios, and then the office is an entire office block that we can move around in. And the same with a lot of the house locations and stuff. We call them “mega blocks,” and so we tend to shoot maybe five scenes together. We’ll ram them all together so what you get is a full sense of journey through the scene. So you can have Dale getting made up in the makeup room, and then he would stand up and then do the walk out to the news desk and sit down and the camera will stay there while he has his makeup touched up and people coming in and out and running.

We can shoot these all as long, 10-minute takes, so that does create a sense of foreboding and anxiety even while you’re doing it because they’re nerve-wracking situations. We have the actual autocue for the news rolling on the screen. We have the music playing, the news intro, very stressful music playing. And reading autocue live is actually really hard, and to sound natural [while reading it] is really hard. But that scene was always there. That was one of the first things that really drew me to the show because that scene, a lot of things get developed as we go, but that scene was always very concrete in Michael Lucas’s original script, and I just thought it was so funny as well.

I’m trying not to laugh just thinking about it. I have to ask you about the specific sound you make when he is about to go on and he’s like, “Ooh!” Where did that come from? Why did you make that little sound?

[Laughs] Well, because Dale’s doing voice lessons with a vocal coach, so he’s trying to change his voice to sound more like an established professional newsreader. That’s why he sounds so weird and robotic. He’s been taught by some kind of backward, 1980s, I imagine them to be some very strict vocal coach. And that’s actually a vocal warmup that I used to do when I was doing a musical in the West End. Everyone does the vocal sirens where they’re like, “Aah! Aah!” And actors, when they’re doing it, just do it very confidently and walk around the stage just looking absolutely crazy. I love the idea of somebody who’s not that trying to do that, how ridiculous it is for someone else. So that’s where that came from.

I mean, I do a bunch of random crap, and I never know what’s going to end up in the show. Emma always loves the weirder, so you just try and go with it. The good thing about a character like Dale is he’s so messy and uncomfortable and he’s full of all this bound energy that you can do a lot with him because he’s so repressed. One thing I always think about Dale is even when he gets the opportunity on the news desk, he wants to jump up and down or get really excited or scream, but he can’t really let it out. And so that’s that whole thing. He’s always sort of repressed and held down, so everything he does is sort of [Laughs]… has got this weird vibe to it.

He’s such a weirdo. We have to wrap up soon, so a quick Interview With the Vampire question. What can you say about where you are in the production process for Season 3? [A start of production date has not been confirmed as of the time of publication.]

Well, they’re writing it [grins].

Right.

Right, yeah.

Is that all you can say?

[Laughs] I can say that they’re actively writing it.

The Newsreader, Season 1 Streaming Premiere, Thursday, December 19, Sundance Now & AMC+