Lili Reinhart, the girl next door who went looking for villains

Lili Reinhart

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 13, 1996 Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Actress and producer
Known for	Hustlers, Chemical Hearts, Charlie's Angels
Awards	Teen Choice

For most of her adult life, Lili Reinhart answered to someone else’s name. Betty Cooper, the ponytailed honor student of Riverdale, was the fixed point of a series that kept adding serial killers, cults and secret societies around her, and the audience that grew up with Betty never quite separated the two. The question Reinhart has been asking out loud since the show ended is whether an actress who spent her twenties as the girl next door can be believed as anyone else, and whether she can build those chances herself instead of waiting for them.

This month she answered from an unexpected direction. The Love Hypothesis, the adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s bestselling romance, casts her as Olive Smith, a doctoral student who fakes a relationship with a severe professor played by Tom Bateman. She is also one of its executive producers. Reviews split between critics who found the leads’ chemistry enough and those who wanted more depth, but the film put her back where Betty once kept her: in front of a very large audience, this time on her own terms.

Reinhart was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 13, 1996, and grew up in nearby Bay Village. By about ten she was asking her parents to drive her to auditions in New York. The family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, when she was sixteen. At eighteen she tried Los Angeles, went five months without a job and returned to Charlotte, where she spent time in therapy before trying again. She has spoken openly about living with depression since the age of fourteen, and about anxiety and body dysmorphia, long before most of her peers discussed such things on the record.

The early work is a small map of American independent film. She played Vicki in The Kings of Summer, the comedy about teenage boys who build a house in the woods, took a recurring part in the Fox sitcom Surviving Jack and appeared as one of the students in Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens, opposite Lily Rabe. None of it made her famous. All of it taught her the scale she would later return to by choice.

The break came in February 2016, when she was cast as Betty after sending a tape from North Carolina and auditioning in person a month later. The CW’s darker reading of Archie Comics premiered in January 2017 and ran for seven seasons and more than a hundred episodes, until 2023. Betty’s story took her from sweater sets to a serial-killer father, and the show earned Reinhart seven Teen Choice Awards. When it ended she was clear-eyed about what it had been, telling Collider the cast should be grateful for seven years of steady work and that none of them would ever again make something that ran past a hundred episodes.

She used the gaps between seasons carefully. There was a small role in Mélanie Laurent’s Galveston in 2018 and then Hustlers in 2019, Lorene Scafaria’s film about strippers who drug Wall Street clients, where she played Annabelle, one of the dancers in the scheme, opposite Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu. Chemical Hearts in 2020 and Look Both Ways in 2022 followed for Amazon and Netflix, the first projects she also executive-produced. In 2020 she published Swimming Lessons, a poetry collection that entered The New York Times paperback fiction list at number two, and in 2021 her company, Small Victory Productions, signed a first-look deal with Amazon Studios.

There is a less flattering version of that decade. While Riverdale drifted into a cult favorite that viewers watched partly to laugh at, her early films stayed close to the genre that had made her, young-adult melodrama and romantic crossroads, and neither streaming title stayed in the conversation for long. Her candour off screen sometimes drew more attention than the work. In 2022 she called celebrities who starved themselves for the Met Gala harmful to young fans, a post widely read as a response to Kim Kardashian, and later joked to W magazine that she had not been invited back because she “said a certain something about a certain person in a certain dress.” The pattern has continued since the finale. Critics tend to praise her performances and fault the films around them: CBR called American Sweatshop her best role yet inside a story that could not decide what genre it was, and IndieWire judged Forbidden Fruits a juicy disaster.

Still, the post-Riverdale choices show a plan. In Uta Briesewitz’s American Sweatshop, which premiered at SXSW in 2025 and opened that September, she plays a social media content moderator who sees a violent video on the job and sets out to hold someone accountable. In Cooper Raiff’s Hal & Harper, which premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and reached Mubi in October, she and Raiff play codependent siblings, and their childhood selves too, opposite Mark Ruffalo as their father. It earned her a Gotham Award nomination for lead performance in a limited series. Forbidden Fruits, Meredith Alloway’s horror comedy released in March 2026, finally gave her the villain she had told W she wanted to play: Apple, who runs a witchy coven out of an upscale mall store.

The Love Hypothesis, directed by Claire Scanlon from a script by Sarah Rothschild, arrived on Prime Video on September 23, 2026. Reinhart and Bateman have since recorded an audio romance for the app Quinn, and MRC is developing a film of Hazelwood’s follow-up novel, The Two-Body Problem, due in bookstores in February 2027. Her upcoming slate leans darker: the ensemble comedic thriller The Very Best People with Paul Walter Hauser and Tim Roth, the horror film Bad Boy with Ke Huy Quan, told from the point of view of a serial killer’s dog, and Sean Byrne’s thriller The Mannequin with Melissa Leo. Through Small Victory she is also developing Fake Wedding and producing Razzlekhan for Amazon MGM.

Reinhart came out as bisexual in 2020 and has since added alopecia, ADHD and endometriosis to the list of things she talks about in public rather than hides. She is in a relationship with Jack Martin. The project she keeps returning to in interviews is an adaptation of a novella about lesbian vampires, which she says no studio will touch. “People are too afraid to make that,” she said this month. Whether someone says yes will say as much about how far she has moved from Betty Cooper as any role she has already played.

Tags: actresses, Cooper Raiff, Tom Bateman, Hustlers, Lili Reinhart, The Love Hypothesis

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