Lili Reinhart has her guardrails, and for good reason. Fresh off seven seasons anchoring the campy, hyper-stylized universe of Riverdale, stepping into a new chapter meant navigating the industry without being pigeonholed.

“I was scared,” Reinhart admits candidly in an interview at the Obsessed Retreat in the Bavarian Alps this month. “I was a year out from Riverdale when I was sent the script in 2024. If you do a horror or a rom-com right away, you’re going to get sent 50 of each of those things. The first few projects I did after were independent film and TV. I love indie work, but I was also afraid of being stuck.”

Enter The Love Hypothesis. When the script for the adaptation of Ali Hazelwood‘s runaway bestseller first landed on her desk, Reinhart wasn’t looking for a meet-cute.

“My team was like, ‘This is based off of an incredible book that people love. It’s a beloved character. It’s a beloved world,'” she laughs. Armed with the novel while touching down in Italy for the Venice Film Festival, the self-proclaimed romance skeptic finally cracked the spine. “I fell in love with Olive and Adam and I’m not a romance reader, so I was really pleasantly surprised how much I got lost. I was reading on the plane. I was really invested.”

While BookTok readers are loving the swoon-worthy fake-dating trope that’s part of the cultural zeitgeist, for Reinhart, it was a longing for a bygone cinematic era.

“No offense, but there were no rom-coms of the last decade – very few, really – that made me say, I want to be in that one,” she says with a wry grin. “There are some good movies, of course, but I just think in general rom-coms became very far away from the ’90s and early 2000s charm that they had, and so this one actually felt like we were going back to that, and that was intentional. I think those movies, the Julia Roberts era, were so special because when I’m thinking about those movies, whether it’s Pretty Woman or Notting Hill or Uptown Girls, and even The Holiday, which is like the best movie ever, I don’t think about the plot. I think about the characters.

She continued, “I think the hope for this movie was that in the future, when people are looking back and talking about it, they’re talking about Olive and Adam, and they’re not talking about ‘Oh, it was a scientist fake dating comedy.’ Sure, people will still describe it that way, but I think the whole point was that these characters were so built out that you really fell in love with them, and you didn’t get lost in the plot of it all.”

Stepping onto set as a producer meant wielding a level of creative agency Reinhart had to fight years to cultivate. Armed with a year of development notes, she treated Hazelwood’s text as sacred ground.

“I definitely had notes. I got the script, and luckily, we had a whole year to sort of massage it before we filmed, and so I just had basically thoughts about Olive,” she explains. “I said, you know, when I’m an actor and I’m coming onto something, hopefully the director or producers are choosing me for a reason because of what I can bring to the character, and a lot of times what I can bring is just my own perspective. So, if it’s even like one line that I need to shift it in a way so that it comes organically out of my mouth, like the way that it’s written on the page, I just need to massage it a little bit so that I can fully feel it in my body before it comes out. It’s sort of this thing I have where it’ll just feel like fake acting. It’ll feel like bad acting to me if the words aren’t fully sitting well in my body.”

That creative collaboration went hand-in-hand with an absolute reverence for Hazelwood’s readers.

“It was a collaborative process, and I was able to sort of implement who I thought Olive was from the book,” she says. “I had the book with me every day in my trailer. It was always sitting there like this beautiful little Bible in my trailer. And anytime I needed to just check in about something, I would. But there were specific lines that I said were really important that I knew fans really would want in there, and some of them made it in there, some of them didn’t. You can only do so much when it’s a book-to-movie adaptation. You can’t squeeze everything in there.

She continued, “But I really tried to protect as much as possible and as much of those fan-favorite moments as possible, but they were already in there. The people making the movie, our producers, our director, our writer, knew and loved the book as much as I did. We all had the same vision.”

Off-screen, Reinhart is equally intentional about the energy she invites into her life. When asked about an underrated green flag, she immediately points to her partner and former Riverdale co-star KJ Apa, admiring those rare people who make an effort to learn every crew member’s name. “It’s just an aura, right? It’s just like a really good, warm, knowing, calm, very present… I would love to see more people who make every person in the room feel like, Oh, I’m in the room as well.”

That desire for presence has reshaped her mindset as she approaches a milestone birthday. Long vocal about her struggles with depression and anxiety, Reinhart recognized that she spent her twenties sitting comfortably in those diagnoses, sometimes using them as a shield against doing the deeper emotional work.

“Knowing I’m turning 30, I wanted to go into my 30s with a very different attitude,” she reflects. “I can be someone who experiences depression and anxiety, but I don’t have to be it. I had to actually make a conscious decision to make that flip in my brain, and then choose to work towards that and try and view things in an optimistic way.”

These days, her joy comes from tactile, offline rituals—specifically Sunday night cooking sessions with her partner, spending two uninterrupted hours without phones, TikTok, or background television, just listening to music and working with their hands.

And while Olive Smith leans on her fiercely loyal confidante Anh on screen, Reinhart reserves that credit in real life for her mother. Calling her the genuine best friend of her life, she marvels at her mother’s lifelong role as the family’s selfless caretaker. “If I’m feeling anxiety, she’ll be like, ‘Give it to me.’ And that’s a lot to have that space for someone like me who has a lot of that. My mom does it with such grace… My mom is the Anh of my life.”

The Love Hypothesis is now streaming on Prime Video.

Feature image courtesy of Prime Video.