In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Ever since breaking out as Betty Cooper on “Riverdale,” Lili Reinhart has been busy, and never has that been more true than the past year. The actor has juggled the release of tender dramedy “Hal & Harper” on Mubi, the production and release of Meredith Alloway’s ensemble horror-comedy “Forbidden Fruits,” and filming for Brian Swibel’s thriller “The Very Best People” and Claire Scanlon’s highly anticipated adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s “The Love Hypothesis.”
Reinhart is on a bit of a break—she did film a BTS music video—but knows “The Love Hypothesis” looms large. “[The fans] keep asking me when it’s gonna come out. And I obviously can’t say,” she says with a laugh on the latest episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast. “I know the date. It’s in my head. I just can’t say it out loud.”
Reinhart might not be able to spill the premiere date, but she can share the work put in to make “The Love Hypothesis,” which she also produced through her Small Victory banner, both ultra-modern and unstuck from any era. “People want to feel good when they watch [rom-coms]. They don’t want to have an existential crisis when they’re watching something like that. It’s just inherently a different type of genre than what my bread and butter is, something like ‘Hal & Harper,’ as an actor,” she says. “But I did ‘Riverdale’ for seven years, which is a heightened, not very realistic tone. ‘The Love Hypothesis’ is somewhere in the middle. It’s not full camp, it’s not full indie filmmaking, it’s dead center.”
Recent rom-coms are often “stuck in a certain era of comedy, in a 2000s sense of humor,” Reinhart says. “I was trying to push the sense of humor a little bit more into the 2020s. People laugh at different things now.… I was lucky enough to work with people who understood that. Our director, Claire, was down for that and wanted to make this movie as relatable as possible. Timeless, while still being timely, which can be a delicate balance.”
In this episode, Reinhart gets candid about the lessons she’s learned about her marathon pace of projects and about herself as both an actor and a person. Listen and subscribe to hear the full conversation:
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