After nearly five years of silence, The Vampire Diaries star Steven R. McQueen is back on social media. For his fans, that’s a much bigger deal than it sounds.
The actor who played Jeremy Gilbert, once one of the show’s big heartthrobs, hadn’t been on screen since 2020. He stopped turning up at events, and in December 2021, his Instagram went quiet. He never said why.
Then, in 2024, his father, Chad McQueen, died, and the fans who’d spent years wondering where he went started worrying about him instead.
Last weekend, he finally reappeared. He took the stage at a Vampire Diaries convention in Paris, looking very different from the guy on fans’ old posters. Online, some of the reactions were brutal. In the room, the fans stood up and applauded him for about a minute.
And on Thursday morning (October 8), four days later, he posted on Instagram for the first time since 2021.
It was one selfie and one line: “Back to the gym. Any music suggestions?” Within 20 minutes, it had more than 20,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Some of them were actually songs.
A Selfie, A Question And Thousands Of Replies
The post itself is about as low-key as it gets. Steven, 38, is sitting at home in a gray T-shirt in front of a landscape painting, looking straight into the camera. There’s no filter and no long caption, and he doesn’t say a word about where he’s been.
It wasn’t completely out of nowhere, either. On Tuesday, he quietly posted an Instagram Story of a Peloton bike, with no text at all, and Just Jared spotted it within the hour. Two days later, he went a step further and posted to his actual feed:
Fans Sent Love (And A Lot Of Playlists)
He asked for music, and he got it. One fan pushed Evanescence’s Sanctuary. Others suggested Green Day’s Basket Case, 3 Doors Down, Creed, Papa Roach and Anastacia’s Left Outside Alone. Someone offered Gym Class Heroes’ Stereo Hearts as “great music for working out.”
One of the most-liked replies, with more than 230 likes, made a case for an entire decade, arguing that ’80s rock makes you want “to rage in the gym.”
Mostly, though, people just wanted him to know they were glad he was back. “We love you!!! So happy seeing you back in the spotlight,” read one of the top replies. “SO PROUD OF YOU!!!” wrote another fan. “Please post more, we need the motivation too.”
A fitness account chimed in with “Yes Steven! But also, remember to be kind to yourself.” A big chunk of the replies came from Brazil, where he clearly has a devoted following. “Welcome, we love you and we’re happy you’re back,” one Brazilian fan wrote in Portuguese (our translation).
Some of the comments came from people who’d just met him in person. “It was so nice to meet you in Paris,” one wrote. Another simply said, “Thank you for this weekend.”
The Paris Weekend, And What He Actually Said
To understand why that selfie hit fans so hard, you have to go back to Paris.
On October 3 and 4, Steven joined Paul Wesley, Ian Somerhalder, Kat Graham and Riley Voelkel at the Forever Mystic Falls Fan Meet in Paris. According to People, it was his first public appearance since 2019. His last screen role was in 2020.
As clips of his new look spread, the cruel comments came fast, and so did the fans shutting them down. (We covered the whole Paris story here.)
What got a little lost in all that noise is what he actually said. Fans have kept posting new clips from the panels since the weekend, and in them he comes across as relaxed and funny, and clearly happy to talk about Jeremy.
At the opening panel, Paul Wesley welcomed him as “the return of the hunter,” then deadpanned, “I didn’t watch the show.”
At his own panel, one fan asked which of Jeremy’s girlfriends he worked best with. “I think Jeremy loved them all in different ways,” Steven said, adding that losing Vicki and Anna “was hard on him.” Asked who Jeremy should have ended up with, he picked Bonnie, pointing out she was the only one still alive.
Bonnie came up again when he was asked about his favorite scenes. He said her chanting days were always fun, because they were “usually a bunch of made up words” and he didn’t have to learn them. His favorite? “Probably the first kiss.”
Then came the big one: as Elena’s little brother, which Salvatore did he prefer as a brother-in-law? He went with Stefan, and his reasoning was hard to argue with: “Damon killed me.” (Damon snapped Jeremy’s neck back in season two, and only the Gilbert ring brought him back.) Damon, he added, “was a bit more of a troublemaker.”
One fan who met him that weekend wrote afterward that “he said he is slowly easing back into con life and it was good to be back.”
What Being Back Online Could Mean
We still don’t know why Steven stepped away, and we’re not going to guess. That part is his to share, if he ever wants to.
But look at how the past week has gone. He flew to Paris and faced a room full of fans, posted a Peloton Story two days later, and now he’s back on his main feed, asking his followers a question and waiting for their answers.
For someone who went quiet for nearly five years, that’s a lot of doors opening at once.
And there’s more coming. Convention listings have him booked for Vampire Diaries events in Dortmund, Germany, in December, Manchester, England, in February and Covington, Georgia, the real-life Mystic Falls, in April. He’s also confirmed to return to Paris next October.
He asked for a workout playlist. What he got was a welcome home party, and thousands of people asking him to please post again soon.