When Apple TV+ decided to make City on Fire, a post-9/11-era mystery drenched in indie sleaze and emotional volatility, they didn’t just hire actors—they handed over flamethrowers to people willing to burn. Nico Tortorella and Xavier Clyde don’t just carry the series, they combust in it.
For Clyde, it’s the first major production of his career. “It still doesn’t feel real,” he admits. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up back in my apartment in L.A.” It’s a disarming honesty from someone who just spent eight episodes holding his own in some of the series’ heaviest emotional territory—including a raw, complicated relationship with Tortorella’s William, a self-destructive former rock star with enough secrets to black out Manhattan.
“William is constantly trying to find something different,” says Tortorella. “There’s an addiction to newness—whether it’s heroin or relationships.” But it’s Mercer, Clyde’s character, who becomes the emotional anchor. “He’s the most lovable, loyal person. He makes William want to be better.”
Their chemistry is palpable, even offscreen, but it’s earned through the kind of vulnerability actors usually don’t talk about. “You do carry some of it with you,” Clyde says. “Even if you don’t mean to, it follows you home.” Tortorella agrees: “TV moves so fast, you’re just constantly switching gears—but the emotional trail lingers.”
That emotional weight doesn’t come from melodrama. The show takes on addiction, race, class, queerness, and trauma—not like a checklist, but like a city block where all those realities collide. “We were shooting post-revolution,” Tortorella explains, referring to the global protests and reckonings that rippled through 2020. “But the show takes place in 2002. So we had to navigate how those conversations were then, versus how they are now.”
The timing wasn’t accidental. As much as City on Fire is about a girl shot in Central Park, it’s also about the fever pitch of New York just after 9/11. “There’s a post-trauma energy that fuels the music and the chaos,” Tortorella says. And that chaos includes their character’s former life as a rock frontman. The music is totally real. “I spent every day I wasn’t on set in the studio figuring out who this guy was,” they say. “I haven’t left the studio since.”
In fact, the show unearthed something deeper. “I’m making music full-time now,” Tortorella says. “This show gave me that. I’m forever grateful.” They never fronted a band before, but call it another case of life imitating indie drama.
Clyde, meanwhile, may have grown up more on Kendrick than Karen O, but he gets it. “Rock music is raw. It’s unfiltered emotion. I had a Linkin Park phase,” he laughs. “But the show helped me appreciate the power of that energy.”
The era’s music—Strokes, Stripes, Interpol—is more than just a Spotify cue. It’s a time capsule. “That was my initiation to the world,” says Tortorella. “Thrift shops, underground shows, discovering myself.” The soundtrack is a resurrection of early-2000s tension and tenderness, back when everyone was trying to be cool and not get blown up.
As for the show’s layered identities, both actors are proud it doesn’t shy away from any of it. “This is what New York is,” Clyde says. “So many different lives intersecting. There’s cause and effect to all of it.”
And through it all, love survives. Even in a city on fire.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
