Lili Reinhart doesn’t want a spectacle. When it comes time to suggest a place for us to meet for this very interview, she skips over all the obvious Hollywood hot spots—no-phones-allowed member’s clubs, trendy restaurants, hikes in the Hills—and instead, invites me to her house to paint. Which is how, on a sunny October afternoon, I end up in a quiet neighborhood a half-hour drive from the center of L.A., where Reinhart welcomes me with a warm hug and ushers me into her Spanish-influenced home. This despite the fact I’m 15 minutes too early (the perils of trying to accommodate for California traffic).
If at first the choice of location surprises me—celebrities often loathe giving writers a glimpse into their hallowed grounds—it quickly makes complete sense. Reinhart, 29, isn’t interested in playing the part of Capital-C celebrity. Being an actress is a part of who she is, not the entirety of her essence. “In another life, I'm the most domestic human being of all time,” Reinhart says, serving me water in a glass decorated with tiny rainbows. “I have, like, four kids, and I live on a farm, and I get to see my partner every day.”
It’s easy to imagine that other life while she gets us settled in her kitchen, spreading a protective layer of newspaper over a table.
In this life, though, Reinhart is enjoying a few rare days off from filming. She’s been hard at work on three movies this year: the comedic thriller The Very Best People; an adaptation of the best-selling romance novel The Love Hypothesis; the horror movie Forbidden Fruits, which is slated for release in 2026; and she’s ramping up press for her new Mubi show Hal & Harper which began airing in October.
The latter, Reinhart describes as her dream project. “My true bread and butter as an actor is Hal & Harper,” she says, dabbing blobs of pale green and pink paint onto a well-loved palette already covered in the dried remnants of past painting sessions. “I really champion indie filmmaking, and indie filmmakers, and Hal & Harper specifically is the most special thing I've ever done.”
The family dramedy series, co-starring Mark Ruffalo and Betty Gilpin, was written and directed by fellow co-star Cooper Raiff. Raiff was coming off of his film Cha Cha Real Smooth with Dakota Johnson when he approached Reinhart about the show, asking her to play the role of his sister. They met for coffee in Sherman Oaks, and while Raiff was vague about the details, she could tell that it was his passion project. When he shared the script with her, she was blown away. “I just was like, why me? How do you look at my body of work and see me in such a raw and nuanced role?” she wonders aloud.
Fendi jacket, shirt, and skirt; Giuseppe Zanotti heels; Swarovski earrings; Van Cleef & Arpels rings and bracelet; Cartier glasses
Raiff later tells me, over Zoom, that casting Reinhart made perfect sense. “When I watched her in interviews, and also when I watched her range—I saw Hustlers and I saw Chemical Hearts, and I've seen scenes from Riverdale—it's very clear that she's a very deep human being, and she's very soulful. She's a great actress, and she's very talented, but I think the main thing that I felt was just how much depth she has, and that she has so many different things inside of her to explore. Lili just jumps out. The camera sees all of it.”
Reinhart was ready to stretch the acting muscles she built up over the course of 137 episodes of shooting Riverdale. Though the plot lines became increasingly wild over its seven season run, it also meant that the actors got to dabble in just about every kind of acting style there is, across genres and time periods and ages, all of it emotionally and physically challenging. “I feel like I could do anything because I had this seven year runway of experience,” Reinhart says.
Hermès coat; Zadig & Voltaire blazer; Swarovski earrings and necklace; Khaite gloves; Falke tights
That’s not to say that Reinhart wants to separate herself from Riverdale. “Anyone who bashes the work that got them to where they are is doing themselves a great disservice,” she says matter of factly. "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.”
But it’s undeniable that Hal & Harper gives Reinhart the chance to show a different side. She’s devastating as Harper, a 24-year-old lesbian trying to work through her own emotional baggage while simultaneously figuring out what she wants her adult life to look like. A key storytelling conceit in the show is that Raiff and Reinhart also play the children versions of themselves following a traumatic rupture in their family; Harper is “the most jaded nine-year-old of all time,” as Reinhart describes her. But as emotional as it is—“it's not scripted to be crying as much as there is crying in the show; that’s what happens when you have beautiful, human writing,” Reinhart says—Hal & Harper is also funny; as healing as it is heartbreaking. So much of it balances on Harper’s shoulders, a weight Reinhart carries through the series with ease.
That Hal & Harper even got made in today’s streaming landscape feels like a small miracle, but Raiff and the team had been sitting on it for the last two years trying to find a distributor. “We have Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo, but we don't have an IP fan base that makes a studio feel secure,” Reinhart says. “We were told by everyone, ‘This show's gorgeous, it's just not what our platform is looking for right now.’ And it's like, it's maybe not what you think your platform is looking for, but every consumer you talk to is looking for a show that is deeper.”
Thankfully, after a premiere at Sundance earlier this year, Mubi picked up Hal & Harper for streaming. “I really feel like Lili's performance is such a gift that needs to be given to people, and I've never felt that way about work that I've done,” Raiff says. “Lili on screen is such a miracle.”
Talking to Reinhart’s Forbidden Fruits co-star Lola Tung, it’s clear that Reinhart brings that level of passion for her skill to every project. “She's so dedicated,” Tung says to me, over Zoom, a week after my interview with Reinhart. “She has such a powerful presence on set and in a scene, she's so captivating, and she has a confidence about her that I admire greatly and hope to take into future projects.” The two bonded on set and off over late movie nights; Reinhart introduced Tung to The Love Witch, which she calls “lifechanging.” And Reinhart was able to serve as something like a mentor to Tung, who is coming off a hit teen series of her own, The Summer I Turned Pretty.
“I feel almost like a little puppy dog following her around, because she's such a cool friend; she also has so much wisdom to offer and gave me so much great advice,” Tung says. “We talked a lot about all the things you can do to take care of yourself and advocate for yourself when you feel like maybe your voice isn't always heard, especially as a woman in this industry, and when things are moving really fast.”
It’s surreal that Reinhart, who has been acting since she was 12, could be an elder statesman in her industry. But her ongoing quest to achieve inner peace has made her a kind of old soul. For almost as long as she’s been famous, she’s been vocal about the importance of caring for her mental and physical health. She’s unafraid to talk about her depression and anxiety, and recently did an interview with Self discussing her interstitial cystitis diagnosis. If there’s potential to do something good for her nervous system, she’ll try it: She became a Reiki master, gets craniosacral therapy, switched from traditional talk therapy to DBT therapy, and is looking into spinal energetic therapy. The dozens and dozens of tubes of paint scattered across a protective spread of newspaper in front of us are remnants from previous painting sessions, an act she finds therapeutic.
For her part, Reinhart is quick to point out that her fellow actors Ella Purnell and Selena Gomez have been brave enough to speak up, too. Where the generation before them came of age during the tabloid era, they’ve all become famous in the age of social media, where having a smart phone is the only qualification necessary for starting celebrity gossip.
“Suddenly, everyone has a platform, so everyone feels that they need to share their opinions about everything all the time. It didn't used to be that way; a magazine would talk about a celebrity and then you would be able to comment on it in your circle of friends and move on with your life,” she says. “Right now, something comes out, or some celebrity does something, and there's an entire niche group on TikTok talking about that specific thing. That one quote where it's like, ‘it's not your business what other people think of you’? Yeah, well, it's a little hard when it's on social media and millions of other people are seeing that comment that isn't right or true.”
Sportmax coat and belt; Van Cleef & Arpels ring and necklace
Unsurprisingly, that means Reinhart has a complicated relationship with social media. But instead of compensating by oversharing, or by running away from it completely, she threads a careful needle establishing boundaries for herself when it comes to what she’s willing to post. It’s all about finding that elusive sense of balance: She’ll do an interview about her overall health, but doesn’t want to give day-by-day updates on what’s happening with her body; she’ll talk about her boyfriend Jack Martin, but won’t discuss specific details about their relationship.
Still, there’s no hiding how happy Martin makes her. “I'm in my lover girl era right now,” Reinhart says with a smile. The two met on TikTok after Reinhart saw a video he made making fun of Riverdale, and slid into his DMs not long after, making it Instagram official in the summer of 2023. There are challenges to dating a fellow actor though, especially when you’re as in-demand as they both are. At the time of the interview, Martin is in New York filming Mindy Kaling’s new project Not Suitable For Work, and while Reinhart is thrilled for him, she doesn’t love doing long distance.
“It's deeply hard on me to be apart from the person I love. I'm a very domestic woman, and 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 says. “When I'm working, he visits me; when he's working, I visit him; and if we're both working at the same time, which happened a lot this year, we just have to put our heads down and get through it. The feeling of missing someone prolonged over eight weeks is exhausting.”
Which is perhaps why Reinhart is diligent about what she takes on; on how Hollywood she wants to be. She’s not a fan of the “one for them, one for you” mentality of committing to the kind of projects that so many actors have relied on over the years. It’s not that she’s completely ruling out the megastar-making superhero vehicles dominating theaters, per se, but she also isn’t currently pursuing those auditions.
“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,” Reinhart says. “It’s time out of my life—weeks, months—time away from my home, time away from my partner and my family. When someone comes in with an opportunity that's like, ‘Make this move in order to make the next move,’ I don't have the bandwidth.”
Miu Miu top, skirt, and scarf
Reinhart even passed on an opportunity to attend Paris Fashion Week because she’d been traveling and working so much; going to France for two days felt like it would be too much on her body. “I think it's fun for people who are into it. I am not passionate enough about it to sacrifice sleep and quality time at home,” she says. “I'm not a fashion girl, never will be; I remember early days of Riverdale having those conversations and being like, ‘That's just not going to be me.’”
All of that stuff that seems from the outside like a perk of the job—parties, red carpet premieres, big name fashion shows—instead strike Reinhart as a superfluous means of acquiring more fame.
“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,” she rattles off. “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.”
Louis Vuitton top and skirt; Van Cleef & Arpels necklace and rings
Reinhart isn’t convinced. “Yesterday, I watched all six episodes of the Love Is Blind premiere. I made myself pasta and I didn't read a script that I was supposed to read three weeks ago because I just didn't want to, and I had a great time,” she says with a smile and a shrug. “This industry is going to have its way with you if you let it, 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.’”
Ultimately, she doesn’t want to be A Product. That’s partially why her name isn’t on her skincare line Personal Day, even though she’s happy to use her face to help sell the acne-friendly formulas; she’s far more rewarded by her work behind the scenes helping the company run by attending Zoom meetings or sitting in on calls than she is filming a tutorial or modeling in a shoot.
“Someone could find the product and not know that I had anything to do with it; that, to me, is nice, because the products then speak for themselves—that was the most important thing to me,” she says, noting with pride how many texts she’s received from people gushing about how Personal Day has transformed their skin. “Not that I'm the one who formulated it, but I brought it to market with my brand, and that makes me so happy.”
Prada jacket and shirt
Our tiny four-by-four inch canvases are officially complete: Reinhart’s is covered in delicate pastel flowers, abstract in a way that wouldn’t be out of place as a print on a Dôen dress. Mine—a very rudimentary crab stranded solo on an island with a coconut tree, a go-to absentminded sketch of mine for years—isn’t nearly as display-ready as hers, but she expresses dismay when I try to leave it behind. (I end up hand-carrying it in my Uber back to my hotel at her suggestion.)
As Reinhart bags up the last cheese pastry with some travel-friendly products from Personal Day for me to try, I ask what she’s most excited about in the coming months. True to form, the answer is simple: being at home with Martin while they both have breaks this December, a white chicken chili recipe from his mom made with fancy ingredients from Bristol Farms cooking in the Crock-Pot. “I have all the time in the world to do, hopefully, whatever I want to do,” she says. “My best performance is yet to come, because I’m still so young, and maybe the best thing I'll ever do is when I'm 60. But my whole life cannot be my career—and I also don't want it to be.”
Photographer Lenne Chai | Stylist SK Tang | Hair Stylist Ericka Verrett | Makeup Artist Melissa Hernandez | Manicurist Queenie Nguyen | Producer Luciana De La Fe | Video Director Sarah Al Slaity | DP Kyle Hartman | Video Producer Kellie Scott