Every corner of Lili Reinhart’s Los Angeles home is stirring this morning.

One can hear, for example, the faintest flutter of wings as Reinhart gets up and shoos a bird away. One can see her pale salmon wallpaper glint as it catches light. Through Zoom, I can almost smell the eggy breakfast the actress ordered-in; I listen to her dog Milo’s paws pitter patter. It’s hard to imagine this hub without its center of gravity: the meticulous, arresting Reinhart.

It’s actually difficult to envision 2020s television without Reinhart, who has been at the epicenter of our dramedy landscape since she appeared as Betty Cooper on The CW’s cult favorite series, Riverdale, in the latter half of the 2010s. Since Riverdale’s conclusion in 2023, Reinhart has been busy filming, and at the time we speak, she’s finally returned to her home in Los Angeles after balancing numerous projects at once, between New York City and Montreal. Though she’ll soon return to Manhattan to keep shooting, today is for herself—today, she’ll get a facial from her friend Sarah, and she’ll bring her dog Milo with her.

“I came home last night, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is right. This is right,’” Reinhart tells me. Her shoulders relax as she exhales into her space.

Reinhart has wrapped production on the highly anticipated adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s New York Times best-seller The Love Hypothesis. With Amazon MGM Studios backing the project and Reinhart serving as an executive producer, The Love Hypothesis is keeping the BookTok community well-fed. While BookTok casting can be met with harsh criticism, fans seem to be over the moon with their Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen, the film’s centerfold characters.

Olive, played by Reinhart, is a pragmatic Stanford PhD student who fake-dates her petulant professor Adam, played by Tom Bateman. While a fake romance may seem like a win-win for both of them, plans capsize when Adam’s brooding eyes start showing signs of his wanting of something more.

In the meantime, Reinhart wrapped filming for Forbidden Fruits with Lola Tung, Emma Chamberlain, Gabrielle Union, and Victoria Pedretti. The story, directed by Meredith Alloway, follows the secret lives of employees at a store in the mall, and is set to release next year. While in production for the film, Reinhart also prepared for the September release of American Sweatshop—a gripping thriller that exposes how macabre digital events can distort a person’s reality. The film is somber, scary, and comes with a grave, if not all-too-familiar warning: social media can seriously harm your mental health.

Reinhart knows this just as much as the next person, if not more. Strangers online go as far as asking her if she sells her hair (yes, her hair), so Reinhart recognizes the importance of cultivating a safe digital forum, and she harnesses her platform with compassion. There’s no bullshit with this 29-year-old, the woman who went from leaving LA at 18 after struggling to book roles to immediately securing Betty Cooper on Riverdale after coming back at 19. Nearly 10 years later, Reinhart has her own production company, Small Victory Productions, and she is settling into her skin.

“I don’t want to ever feel like I’m presenting the most polished, beautiful version of myself all the time. I think that’s one, exhausting—I could never keep up that image—and two, that’s just not true to who I am,” she says.

For a while, Reinhart couldn’t stand her organic form. The actress tells me she’d create fake bangs on red carpets, do her own makeup in Riverdale trailers, and anxiously wait for the beauty filter to be added in edits—all to avoid people seeing her bare skin. Now, Reinhart knows that not wanting others to see her skin meant not wanting them to see her, and she’s determined to reject shame.

She does this with her skincare brand, Personal Day, a non-acne-triggering brand founded on the belief that one shouldn’t feel like they have to hide. Reinhart finds joy in the process of discovering things that work for her, testing each product (the most popular being the Trust Me On This Hypochlorous Acid Spray) on herself and her partner Jack Martin. As Personal Day reaches its first birthday this October, Reinhart wants the brand to keep growing in empathy: “I have this opportunity to create something, and if it’s going to help other people, it will also help me.”

But here’s the thing: clear skin or not, confidence comes in waves. Reinhart has known this since she was 14, when she was diagnosed with depression. “It’s who I am…I was told at a young age that I have sort of a melancholy air around me, and I don’t know where it came from. I think I just have been a big soul trapped in this body for a long time,” she reflects, adding that maybe she grew up too fast.

Her character in the Sundance-selected series Hal & Harper knows what that’s like. Written and directed by Cooper Raiff (Cha Cha Real Smooth), Hal & Harper navigates the evolution of a family disjointed by grief and codependency. The indie series—which debuted earlier this year but was picked up by Mubi and is set to debut on the channel’s streaming platform this fall—features Mark Ruffalo as the father to siblings Hal (Raiff) and Harper (Reinhart). It’s a crushingly uplifting project that speaks clearly and gracefully to the delicate nature of love and family. Between the deepest rifts of hurt and love are real people who just want to be seen.

“It was the best script I’d ever read…I think it’s the most human story I’ve been able to tell from my career,” Reinhart says of the show. “From day one of reading the script, I was not scared to play [Harper]. I thought it was actually a privilege to play someone who felt so real.”

Harper strives for goodness, but she pushes people away. In her own life, Reinhart is familiar with that feeling. She’s outspoken about her mental health on social media, but she says sometimes her brain’s crawlspaces call her inwards. That solitude can be debilitating, and feelings of hopelessness were exacerbated by a serious health scare last year.

After months of suffering from crippling bladder pain, Reinhart was diagnosed with what her doctors think is interstitial cystitis. It’s a chronic condition that causes inflammation in her bladder wall. While there are times when Reinhart can barely stand herself up, she does and refuses to succumb.

“I don’t ever settle, and I think that’s something that women are told to do…There must be a solution, not to cure everything, but to help everything,” she says firmly. Speaking up for herself, leaning on those who believe her, and letting herself be helped are lessons she learned from her late grandmother, who passed away last November from ovarian cancer. The pain of losing her grandmother was shattering, but Reinhart knew she had to remember her legacy. She’s still looking for answers, and she’s slowly narrowing what works for her.

In a way, it all boils down to the hunt. Joy isn’t something to be believed in—it’s something Reinhart knows exists, and she’s doing whatever she can to pocket it, even when her mind and body try to reject the concept.

“I just don’t accept that joy should be fleeting for me,” Reinhart says. “I think that I deserve joy, and it’s in there somewhere. I’m going through obstacles of my brain being unable to find it, but…even if I find it when I’m 80…then that was my purpose.”

“I struggle on a daily basis to carry on a lot,” she continues. “When I get out of those modes, and I am living my life and experiencing moments of happiness, I understand why I’m still going and why I’m still here.”

In a strange way, the pursuit of joy is more important than its actualization. Whether the journey takes her from Canada to New York and back a million times over, Reinhart is going to make it, because the trek is worth the wait. “I’m going to appreciate the fact that I was given this one life, and even if the life, day by day, is not bursting with joy and happiness—the whole part, the whole reason why we’re here is to live and experience. And I think, again, if I find joy on my deathbed, then that will have been my journey... If my experience means that I’m searching for that joy, then that’s what my life is meant to be.”

Photographed by Sam Dameshek

Styled by Christopher Campbell

Written by Julia Zara

Hair: Mark Townsend

Makeup: Jenna Kristina

Nails: Erin Moffett

Flaunt Film: Jonathan Ho

Production Assistant: Zoe Swintek