Learning that two of your faves used to hang out is always exciting. But when those two faves are two of the sexiest people alive who have both played iconic bisexual characters? That calls for celebration.
Our collective crush on Irish hunk Josh O’Connor reached its zenith with 2024’s Challengers, and our similar obsession with Aussie actor Sam Reid has long achieved feral status after the one-two punch of 2025’s The Newsreader and 2026’s The Vampire Lestat. O’Connor and Reid are both heartthrobs in the classic style—but apparently some people are just catching on to the fact that they share a history.
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To be quite clear, it’s most likely a history of friendship, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from drawing their own conclusions.
Our tale begins in 2014, when a choice collective of dreamy UK hunks teamed up for The Riot Club, a sort of teen angsty Dead Poet’s Society-Fight Club joint set at Oxford. The film stars every boy you probably had a huge crush on in 2014, from Jack Farthing to Freddie Fox to, wouldn’t you know it, Josh O’Connor and Sam Reid. It even had Douglas Booth, the UK’s answer to Gossip Girl heartthrob Chase Crawford.
Suffice to say It was a twink-off of wild proportions!
We don’t know too much about how Reid and O’Connor first met on set, but we do know they formed a friendship so deep that it involved mixtapes.
One of the primary pieces of evidence we have for this bond comes to us via a playlist O’Connor started in 2016 simply titled: “Sam Reid.” What’s on it? Some Years & Years (makes sense, since frontman Olly Alexander was their Riot Club costar) some Jamie xx (very 2016) and one quite intriguing inclusion: Bronski Beat’s gay anthem “Smalltown Boy,” about a young man who leaves home after a gay-bashing incident.
You might be thinking, ok sure, it’s an old playlist, who cares. But the plot deepens when you realize that O’Connor added to the playlist as recently as 2023.
“Fans love to speculate Sam had a thing with O’Connor and their other costar Douglas Booth,” one Redditor shared. And yes, we do love to speculate! Though the fact that O’Connor and Reid have never clarified their sexualities and are both currently dating women could take the air out of that theory.
Then again, there’s also the intriguing fact that O’Connor created a “moving on” playlist not long after starting this one.
Neither men have addressed PlaylistGate, but since it keeps coming up as new fans discover their shared history, you never know. Reid did at one point make a cheeky nod to the playlist by stating in an interview that he keeps his own Spotify selections private.
It’s likely that we’ll never know what—if anything—transpired between these two beloved icons of bisexual film & TV, but we can dream. We can also just go rewatch The Riot Club literally any time we want, so there’s that!
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