Lili Reinhart, The Actress Looking For Success Away From Hollywood Clichés

Lili Reinhart isn’t interested in being a celebrity… and the 30-year-old actress has proven this throughout her career. The moment her name started making headlines for her starring role as Betty Cooper in the TV series Riverdale (2017-2023), control over what she wanted (and didn’t want) in her life seemed to slip from her grasp. And, as her fame grew, she also had to confront her insecurities: subjected to constant media exposure, her life suddenly belonged to the public.

Perhaps that’s why the Cleveland-born actress spent the last three years building her career away from the media spotlight. But now, she’s made her return to center stage.

Reinhart is starring in The Love Hypothesis (2026), a romantic comedy that premiered last week. It’s based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Ali Hazelwood. The premise of this young adult novel is simple: a fake relationship ends up becoming something more.

“I was afraid that if I did either a horror movie or a romcom, I was going to be pigeonholed into those two things,” the actress explained back in July, in an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine. For that same reason, she turned down the first offer to play Olive Smith (the main character in The Love Hypothesis).

“Then,” she added, “I read [the novel] on my way to the Venice Film Festival. It was juicy and fun and I was like, ‘Okay, I understand why people love this book, the charm it has and the slow burn between these two people who are falling in love.’” Less than 48 hours after its release, The Love Hypothesis is already the most-watched film on Prime Video.

Reinhart’s experience has taught her that, one day, you’re on top of the world… and the next — even if it’s by choice — you vanish from the scene. “I would like to think that I can have a career where I can try to dodge those climbing ladder steps as much as possible. It’s time out of my life — weeks, months — time away from my home, time away from my partner and my family,” she told Marie Claire magazine in November of 2025.

Over the past decade, she has experienced a meteoric rise to stardom, a highly-publicized breakup — with Cole Sprouse, her co-star on Riverdale — the demands of her career, as well as personal and health issues that she’s been dealing with (while seemingly living a life straight out of a movie).

From a young age, she knew that she wanted to be an actress… but not at any cost. “I’m not here on this earth to collect accolades. I really love to act and to connect to my emotions […] and it just so happens to be on camera,” she told Cosmopolitan.

Those emotions she spoke of have shaped her life and career. At 14, she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. And, rather than hide this condition, she chose to share it with her followers. “When I first started going to therapy, it was out of my incredible social anxiety. I was having trouble going to school every day. I was crying before school. I would fake being sick so my mom would let me stay home,” she explained to Glamour magazine, back in 2019. She added: “I am not crazy and I am not problematic. I am just a human who’s feeling something in a different way than some other people would.”

She moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18 to pursue her dream. However, this only exacerbated her anxiety. “I remember looking at my bank account and seeing all of this money that I had saved acting over the course of many years just gone. I had so much anxiety booking work […] I spent almost five months holed up in this bedroom in this house just feeling anxious, waiting for my next audition and not doing anything else. It was the most miserable time of my life,” she told W Magazine in 2017.

In 2020, she published Swimming Lessons, a book of poetry about her depression. She has also spoken about it on Instagram, where she currently has 23.7 million followers. “Some days I feel really defeated by my depression. It’s an exhausting battle that I’ve been fighting for 11 years. And some days, like today, it can feel intolerable. This is a reminder to my fellow warriors that it’s okay to have days where you don’t want to fight anymore. You don’t need to justify your mental health to anyone,” she wrote on Instagram, in 2021.

While dealing with fame and her diagnosis, she also had to recover from her breakup with Sprouse in 2020. Reinhart met him while filming Riverdale; they were in a relationship for three years.

In a 2023 interview, the actor revealed that they remained friends, despite having done “quite a bit of damage to each other.”

When asked how he navigated their breakup on Call Her Daddy — Alexandra Cooper’s hit podcast — Sprouse replied: “I think the work thing got difficult because it was hard to suspend [how] we felt about each other. It didn’t afford us the luxury of distance to really overcome that.”

Reinhart learned from her mistakes and, since then, keeps her relationships as private as possible. “I’m in my lover girl era right now,” she told Marie Claire. She’s currently in a relationship with actor and TikToker Jack Martin. She met him through social media… after he made a video making fun of Riverdale. “It’s deeply hard on me to be apart from the person I love. I’m a very domestic woman. I love to be at home and sit on my couch with my person and my dog; there’s nothing that brings me greater joy than that specifically. And, when I can’t do that, my mental health suffers,” she added.

Over the last 12 months, she’s been working on three movies: she was in the comedy horror film Forbidden Fruits, which premiered back in March, and starred in The Love Hypothesis. And the release date for her comedic thriller, The Very Best People, still hasn’t been announced. Reinhart was also in the series Hal & Harper, which was released last October.

“I feel like I could do anything because I had this seven-year runway of experience,” Reinhart explains in her Marie Claire interview, referring to Riverdale. “Anyone who bashes the work that got them to where they are is doing themselves a great disservice. Call the show crazy. It was. It gave me so much and I’m so thankful for it. I’m not delusional to the fact that I’m sitting in my house because of Riverdale. I’m not embarrassed of it.”

Since the series ended, she admits to being more selective about everything she does; not just the roles she accepts. She avoids Hollywood, movie premieres (unless they’re for a project that she’s in) and fashion shows.

“Suddenly you need to care about fashion, and you need to go to these fashion shows, and you’re an influencer for a brand, your goal is to get a beauty contract. Aren’t I just making art? Aren’t I just supposed to be an actor? Why am I trying to pursue this avenue or this project so that I can actually do what I want? And it’s like, oh, well, that’s because that’s how it fucking works: it becomes about climbing this impossible ladder and staying as famous as possible and as relevant as possible,” she reflected in Marie Claire.

“This industry is going to have its way with you if you let it,” she added. “And I very much try to be like, ‘No, I’m going to be over here enjoying my life and not letting you control my happiness.’”

That’s why she decided to take the reins and be the one to make her problems and achievements public. In 2025, she revealed that she was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis (also known as BPS, bladder pain syndrome), a chronic condition that causes pain, pressure and the urgent or frequent need to urinate. Reinhart also suffers from adenomyosis — a condition in which immune cells release too many chemicals — which intensifies inflammation and pain. She underwent surgery last December, after which she received a diagnosis of endometriosis.

“I feel like every year I get diagnosed with something else,” she lamented in Cosmopolitan. “I had these underlying issues that I didn’t know about. Now [that] I’ve been diagnosed, I know that I have inflammatory disorders. It makes sense that I was super inflamed in my body. My face was a completely different shape. I felt so deeply out of control of my own body.”

Given her history, she decided to take a business step in this direction. At the end of 2024, she launched the Personal Day skincare line, focused on products to address acne. “[Acne] is something I’ve dealt with since I was 12 and the problem only got worse as I got older,” she explained at the launch.

The brand doesn’t use her name in promotional materials. She prefers to work quietly, letting people talk about the products for what they are, not because of who’s behind them.

With The Love Hypothesis, Reinhart has clearly decided that it’s time to be in the spotlight again. Capitalizing on the film’s release and her television appearances, she’s paid homage to some of the most acclaimed romantic comedies of the 1990s and early 2000s. She’s turned the film’s promotional campaign into a love letter to the genre, recreating the iconic looks of its stars. Every dress she chooses ends up in the headlines and generates social media buzz. For example, she has worn a replica of the legendary yellow dress from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), acquired the only copy of the coat that Jennifer Garner wore in 13 Going on 30 (2004) and paid homage to the dress that Brittany Murphy wore in Uptown Girls (2003). She’s also donned a custom recreation of the form-fitting purple dress Sandra Bullock wore in Miss Congeniality (2000) and commissioned a design similar to the one Drew Barrymore wore in Ever After (1998). Most recently, for her Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday, September 23, she debuted a Miu Miu dress inspired by a scene from My Date with the President’s Daughter (1998).

The actress still has dreams to fulfill: “I always just really love playing someone who’s gay or bi or any type of queer,” she told Cosmopolitan. “Because I am [too] and I would love to see bisexuality represented without it being made fun of. I do often think if you’re not lesbian, if you’re not gay and you’re anywhere else on the spectrum, you’re being seen as ‘other’ — a generic queer person being added for the plot.”

However, in her immediate future, she has two projects awaiting release: the comedy thriller The Very Best People and The Mannequin, both currently in post-production.

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