Lili Reinhart

Five days ago Prime Video put out The Love Hypothesis, a romantic comedy about a biology PhD student who fakes a relationship with an insufferable professor. Lili Reinhart stars in it and produced it, which is roughly where her career has landed: she picks the projects now, and increasingly she pays for them too.

It has taken a decade and one very long teen drama to get there.

Bay Village, Ohio

She was born on 13 September 1996 in Cleveland and grew up in Bay Village, a small town on Lake Erie, the middle of three sisters. By ten she was asking her mother to drive her to New York for auditions. At sixteen the family moved to North Carolina.

She moved to Los Angeles at eighteen to act professionally, lasted five months and went home exhausted and out of work to start therapy. She has said she was close to giving up. Her early credits were small: an episode of 'Law & Order: SVU', a teenager in The Kings of Summer (2013) and a pupil in Miss Stevens (2016), sharing a classroom with a then-unknown Timothée Chalamet.

Seven years of Riverdale

She was cast in February 2016, and Riverdale arrived on The CW the following year. What began as a moody take on the Archie comics turned into one of those shows Netflix converts into a global teenage habit, running seven seasons and getting steadily madder until it finished in 2023.

She played Betty, the girl next door with a basement full of trauma. It brought her seven Teen Choice Awards and a level of attention she hadn't asked for, plus a heavily documented relationship with her co-star Cole Sprouse between 2017 and 2020. Both have since talked about how unpleasant it was to conduct in public.

Getting out from under the part

She spent the gaps between seasons making films that looked nothing like the show. In Hustlers (2019) she was the stripper who throws up when she gets nervous, opposite Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu. 'Chemical Hearts' (2020) and 'Look Both Ways' (2022) followed, both with her name on them as an executive producer.

In September 2020 she published 'Swimming Lessons', a collection of poems about heartbreak and anxiety that went to number two on the New York Times bestseller list. A year later she set up her own company, Small Victory Productions, with a first-look deal at Amazon. She came out as bisexual in an Instagram story in June 2020.

The year it turned

Her reinvention arrived all at once in 2025. First came 'American Sweatshop', which played SXSW and reached cinemas that September, with Reinhart as a social media content moderator who becomes fixated on a violent video she has to review.

Then came Hal & Harper, Cooper Raiff's series, which premiered at Sundance and went out on Mubi in October. She plays Harper, a woman in her twenties tethered to her brother and to a wrecked childhood, with Mark Ruffalo as their father and Betty Gilpin. She produced it as well, and in 2026 it won her the Gotham Award for outstanding lead performance in a limited series.

She went to the opposite extreme next. Forbidden Fruits, released in March 2026, is Meredith Alloway's horror comedy about a coven operating out of a shopping mall shop, with Victoria Pedretti, Lola Tung and Gabrielle Union. Then 'The Love Hypothesis', directed by Claire Scanlon from Ali Hazelwood's novel, with Tom Bateman as the professor.

She has also signed on to 'The Mannequin', a Studiocanal thriller from Sean Byrne, alongside Melissa Leo.

Saying the unglamorous parts out loud

A good deal of her public standing comes from off screen. She was diagnosed with depression at fourteen and has talked about it plainly ever since, along with body dysmorphia and acne, which is still not standard practice in her industry.

In January 2024 she revealed an alopecia diagnosis, received in the middle of a depressive episode. Interstitial cystitis followed in 2025 and endometriosis in December of that year. In 2024 she launched her own skincare line, Personal Day.

She has been with the actor Jack Martin since 2023 and still lives in Los Angeles, the city she fled at eighteen.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Lili Reinhart is Not Waving But Drowning (2012); in all, 9 films and 1 TV show over 14 years. They have worked as actress in 10 and producer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Riverdale (2017), with 663 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 8 titles. The person they have worked with most is jeffrey Grover, on 2 films, among them The Kings of Summer and Galveston.