Steven R. McQueen spent six seasons as The Vampire Diaries‘ Jeremy Gilbert, the little brother who grew into one of the show’s most shirtless heartthrobs. Then he vanished for seven years.
Last weekend, he finally walked back into a room full of fans in Paris. He looked nothing like the guy on their old posters, and within hours, the clips were everywhere.
Now 38, Steven joined Paul Wesley, Ian Somerhalder, Kat Graham and Riley Voelkel at the Forever Mystic Falls Fan Meet on October 3 and 4. He did a panel, signed autographs and posed for photos. According to People, it was his first public appearance since 2019.
Some of the comments under those clips were brutal. Then the fans who grew up with him started fighting back.
We’ll get to the video. First, a reminder of who he was, and where he went.
Mystic Falls’ Little Brother Grew Up Fast
When The Vampire Diaries premiered on The CW in 2009, Jeremy was the moody, grieving kid brother of Elena (Nina Dobrev), the one smoking weed and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Over the next six seasons, Jeremy went from stoner to vampire hunter, and Steven went from “Elena’s brother” to a proper heartthrob.
By season four, it was obvious he’d been living in the gym, and the writers found plenty of reasons to take his shirt off. UK gay magazine Attitude ran a “studs close-up” on him, noting he’d been “forced to bulk up for the role – and it’s fair to say his efforts paid off.” In 2014, he was one of the faces of an Abercrombie & Fitch campaign, alongside Colton Haynes.
And yes, we posted our share of his photos on GayBuzzer back then. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.
After he left Mystic Falls, he joined NBC’s Chicago Fire in 2015 as firefighter Jimmy Borrelli, where the shirt kept coming off. When Jimmy was written out in 2016, co-creator Michael Brandt told Entertainment Weekly that Steven “deserves to be a bigger part on a show than probably we can give him.”
Before Jeremy, He Played A Gay Teen On Everwood
Even a lot of big fans have forgotten this one.
One of Steven’s first real roles came in 2006, in the fourth and final season of The WB’s Everwood. He played Kyle Hunter, a teenage piano prodigy being tutored by Ephram (Gregory Smith), who wanted to get him into Juilliard. Kyle was lonely and angry, and slowly it became clear why: he was gay, and he hated himself for it.
In the episode “An Ounce of Prevention,” Ephram pushes Kyle into going to a school dance with a pretty classmate. It goes badly. Afterward, in Kyle’s bedroom, Ephram tells him there’s nothing wrong with being gay, and Kyle asks why he can’t just pretend it isn’t there. Ephram’s answer: “Right now, you’re the only one that hates you.”
Steven was 17. At the time, LGBTQ columnist Steve Charing wrote that Everwood‘s coming out scene “hits the mark,” and pointed out how young the show’s audience was.
Everwood was created by Greg Berlanti, who is openly gay and went on to direct Love, Simon. The Vampire Diaries was co-created by Kevin Williamson, also openly gay. So two of the biggest jobs of Steven’s career came from gay showrunners.
The fandom did its part too. According to Fanlore, Jeremy’s slash pairings include Damon, Tyler and Kol, the Original vampire he ended up killing. On a show with that much neck-biting, it was always going to happen.
Then He Just Vanished
After Chicago Fire, the parts got smaller. He came back as Jeremy for the Vampire Diaries series finale in 2017, and once more on the spinoff Legacies in 2018. His last credited role was a 2020 TV Western, The Warrant, with Neal McDonough.
After that, nothing. He stopped doing red carpets and interviews. He’d only ever posted on Instagram now and then, and the last post went up in December 2021.
Scroll back through those few posts, though, and almost none of them are about acting.
For years, Steven supported the Thirst Project, a nonprofit that builds clean water systems for communities without safe drinking water. Most of its work is in eSwatini (the African kingdom formerly known as Swaziland), and he flew out to help put wells in the ground himself. In 2019, he asked fans to sponsor his World Water Day walk, writing, “I believe that water is a human right.” A year later, he posted this from eSwatini:
In another post, he’s helping a group of local men lower a new pump into the ground, both hands on a long blue pipe. The rest of his feed is mostly other causes: a foster youth charity founded by his mom and stepdad, a housing nonprofit working across Latin America and, in his very last posts, a marine mammal rescue center.
Then, in September 2024, his father, actor and racing driver Chad McQueen, died at 63. Chad was the son of Hollywood legend Steve McQueen.
Steven has never said publicly why he stepped away. Some fans have filled in the blanks themselves, with theories about grief and mental health. He hasn’t confirmed any of them, and we’re not going to guess.
The Paris Weekend
Which brings us back to Paris. This is the clip his appearances agency posted on the first day of the convention:
Yes, he looks different. His head is shaved, and he’s carrying a lot more weight than the guy in the Abercrombie ads.
Celebrity sites noticed. One headline called him “nearly unrecognizable,” and under the videos, the comments got nasty fast.
Fans Have One Request: Leave Him Alone
The fandom wasn’t having it.
“Seeing videos of steve mcqueen at the tvd event is making me feel so maternal,” one fan wrote on X. “I will punch anyone who says something bad about him.”
Another pointed out how much courage it must have taken “to bite the bullet and do this meet-and-greet, after not being in the public-eye for a good few years.” A third was blunter: “He gained some weight and people act like he’s going to die.”
The people actually in the room went further. When Steven walked out for his own panel, the whole audience got to its feet and applauded him for about a minute.
“When his panel came, we wanted to show him just one thing: here, he was loved,” one French fan wrote in her caption (our translation). Her own video of the moment has been watched more than half a million times.
He seems to have felt it. One fan, who’d seen two of his planned convention appearances fall through, in 2018 and 2022, finally met him in Paris. She wrote afterward that “he said he is slowly easing back into con life and it was good to be back.”
The general mood was simple. He’s 38, he’s allowed to change, and after seven years away, he got on a plane and showed up for them. The least people can do is be kind about it.
And He’s Not Done
Paris doesn’t look like a one-off, either.
After the weekend, his agency thanked him “for coming out, spending the weekend with the fans,” and its first-day post promised “more show announcements coming soon.” Convention listings already have him booked for a Vampire Diaries event in Dortmund, Germany, in December, then Manchester in February and Covington, Georgia (the real-life Mystic Falls) in April.
He’s coming back to Paris, too. People Convention has already announced that Steven, Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder will return for next year’s Forever Mystic Falls Fan Meet on October 23 and 24, 2027.
Seven years ago, Jeremy Gilbert walked out of the spotlight. Judging by that calendar, he’s planning to stick around this time.