Lili Reinhart has 9.7 million Instagram followers, two Teen Choice Awards, and a starring role on Gen Z’s answer to Gossip Girl. But on the day of her BAZAAR.com shoot, she’s dealing with the sort of minutiae any 21-year-old can relate to: her roommate accidentally left a bag of food in their empty apartment, and they’re both worried about attracting bugs.

Tyler Joe

Derek Lam sunglasses, The Row trench coat, Mizuki pearl bracelet, Mara Hoffman swimsuit, Donni scarf.

This, Reinhart insists, is what her life is really like. Forget the red carpets and the photo shoots, the trips around the world and the TMZ cameras in her face. Lili Reinhart is a normal girl who hides her breakouts with baseball hats, binges Mindhunter, and happens to act for a living. “My life is not glamorous,” she declares. “I do glamorous things.” The legions of adoring fans she’s acquired from playing girl-next-door-with-a-dark-side Betty Cooper on Archie Comics redux, Riverdale, sometimes have trouble recognizing this.

Case in point: the night before this shoot, Reinhart attended a performance of Waitress on Broadway with her co-star Casey Cott—“The most Betty and Kevin thing I've ever heard,” she acknowledges, a nod to their on-screen alter-egos—but after the show, Reinhart says, the two were accosted by a group of fans begging for photos outside the theater. When the actors politely declined, the crowd started screaming. “They said, ‘Why do you hate your fans?’” Reinhart recalls, getting animated. “That felt like the most dehumanizing thing... I see them saying, ‘Your fans are what make you,’ and I appreciate the love and support. But you have to understand that I'm not on 100 percent of the time. And I shouldn't be expected to be.”

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It’s a disorienting contrast from Reinhart’s life 16 months ago, before Riverdale hit the The CW (and shortly after, Netflix), transforming comic book characters verging on obsolescence into hormone-addled global rock stars. Now, Betty, along with Archie (KJ Apa), Veronica (Camila Mendes), and Jughead (Cole Sprouse) solve murders, track down serial killers, and have sex with each other, igniting rabid “shipping wars"—jargon for squabbling fans convinced their favorite couple is best. Caught in the crosshairs, Reinhart finds herself the subject of ceaseless public attention. “People knew who I was in Hawaii, and people knew who I was in Paris. My cast mates have gone all over the world and people recognize them. It’s on a global scale,” she says with discernible astonishment. “I'm a blonde white girl. I have sunglasses on and a hat. How do people look at me, and in an instant, they know? People are seeing my face that much… It's something I can't wrap my head around. I don't know how you ever can.”

Reinhart is adamant about her position on fame: it’s merely a byproduct of pursuing the career she loves. “I don't act to be famous,” she declares. “I just am a performer.” Thus, her privacy is sacred, especially when it comes to her highly-speculated romance with Riverdale co-star Sprouse. ”I'm not okay talking about my relationship,” she says firmly. “I'm not going to tell you my love story. That's just not appropriate right now.” Her family is also off-limits—“It really weirds me out when people DM my mom”—but the one thing she’s had the hardest time adjusting to is, in her words, “the speculation.” “Am I pregnant? Am I dating someone? Am I gay? Am I gaining weight? Am I homophobic?” She rattles off the allegations incredulously. “People will always have something to say. I’ve accepted that. It doesn't mean it's not frustrating when people say those things. It's not like it just rolls off my back.”

Reinhart is quiet and thoughtful, carefully weighing her words before speaking and drawing out her syllables for emphasis. “I had said a lot of things right in the beginning of Riverdale coming out that people took the wrong way,” she recalls. “I had to be like, ‘No, no, no, that's not what I mean’ and backtrack a little bit. We are in a time where people are insulted by everything.” Reinhart learned her lesson, vowing to devote her voice to the issues that are most important to her—backlash be damned. “I choose my battles now,” she says. “If it's something that I'm passionate about, I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to say that I don't approve of our president, I'm going to say that I don't approve of a lingerie line only having skinny models.” Almost inadvertently, Reinhart has become a champion of body positivity and mental health awareness, two deeply personal issues she’s more than willing to discuss publicly.

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First: Instagram, which she has some thoughts about. “We're in a generation where people say, ‘Be who you are. Embrace your differences.’ And then they also praise people who have plastic faces.” She drags out the words, ensuring she conveys exactly what she intends. “It's like, ‘don't deny those rumors.’” She smiles, pauses, collects herself, and goes on: “Here's the thing. If getting plastic surgery is going to make you enjoy your life better, do it…I understand if there are people out there who aren't happy when they look at the mirror, and they can't find that love for themselves. I know people who have gotten plastic surgery and it's changed their lives. That's really wonderful. But I think you should be able own up to it.” She’s also frustrated with social media’s mixed messages—mainly, the hypocrisy of the people who use it. “The most-followed people on Instagram are skinny people who have abs, long legs, silky hair, and filled-in eyebrows. But then people really love when I say, ‘It's OK to not have a 24-inch waist and it's OK to have pimples.’ But those same people are praising the people with images of flawless everything. Which side are you on?”

Tyler Joe

Live the Process top, Tibi pants.

Reinhart's own body image issues started when she was 16 and her metabolism slowed down. What she ate began to show on her body, she says. "It's like, ‘Oh, I'm not going to be a little skinny teenager forever.’” Reinhart still struggles with low self-esteem, but she’s come to accept there will always be something about her body she’ll want to change. For this reason, she’s committed to authenticity. “I'm not that flawless image person. I could never live up to that. I'm not going to make people think I'm this airbrushed version of myself. There are lots of versions of me. My hair looks like shit most of the time. It looks great when I'm on a carpet, sure, but that's not the only side I want people to see of myself.”

The same goes for mental health. Reinhart is candid about her battles with anxiety and depression, devoting dozens of Instagram posts and Twitter threads to the topic. She was diagnosed with depression when she was 14 and credits landing her role on Riverdale to pulling her out of “the worst depression I had ever experienced.” In March 2017, she tweeted, “Don't like what I have to say? I don't fucking care. I'm going to talk about mental health and my own experience with depression whether I have your permission or not.” That still stands today. “Let's talk about [depression] like it actually is,” she says to me. “It’s a very real thing, a day-to-day thing, not just you sitting in a dark room alone. It's something that comes in all shapes and colors and all different scenarios, all different types of people.” She’s seen the real-world effects of her advocacy first-hand, but it’s hard for her to comprehend her own influence. “When I do conventions, and I can meet fans one on one, they tell me, ‘You speaking about mental health has really helped me a lot.’ It's very surreal.”

“Surreal” is the best way to describe Reinhart’s three-month hiatus between Riverdale Season 2 winding down at the end of March and the start of filming Season 3. In between organizing life on the West Coast (“I don't have an apartment in LA. I have a storage unit.”), catching up with family, and vacationing in Mexico and New Orleans, Reinhart found time for her first-ever Met Gala appearance in May. The actress recounts the dream-come-true scenario (in 2017, she tweeted about her desire to attend) as “very humbling.” “I felt like the smallest fish in the biggest pond,” she admits. “It made me see how far I had left to go, and how much work it takes to get to a point where I can go to the Met one day and feel like I'm a big fish now. I'm not there yet, but that's fine, because I'm 21. That's satisfying, to know that I have a place to go.” Still, the fear of “irrelevance” plagues Reinhart—a reminder that imposter syndrome doesn't discriminate. “Am I speaking into the void? Is the work that I'm doing even good? Do people even care? Do people wonder why I'm doing these photo shoots? And I think that's mostly because it's what I feel about myself. People don't think that I'm irrelevant, I hope, but I do sometimes.”

Solid and Striped swimsuit, Michael Kors Collection skirt, Poolside bag, Mizuki earrings and necklace.



But Reinhart has nothing to fear. Riverdale, where it all began, starts filming again this month. When I ask for a tease of the new season, Reinhart first tells me, “I don’t know anything,” then backpedals. She actually knows a lot, because she finally has a say as far as Betty Cooper is concerned. “I feel like I've proven myself to the people I needed to prove myself to. I'm like, ‘I know this girl. I really do.’” She describes the nature of her relationship with Riverdale creator and showrunner Robert Aguirre-Sacasa as “very collaborative” and texts him regularly with ideas about the character and the script. So what exactly does that mean for Season 3? For one, a return to the core of the Archie universe, and thus, Riverdale: friendship. Reinhart is desperate for more scenes with Camila Mendes’s Veronica, as well as Cott and Kevin. “It's something I'm very much pushing for, that you do see the kids interact more as a group,” Reinhart says, admitting that was lost in the family drama of Season 2.

Betty dealt with several particularly difficult blows during that run, including a breakup and reunion with her boyfriend, Jughead; the revelation of her long-lost brother’s murder; and ultimately—spoiler alert!—her father’s unmasking as the “Black Hood” terrorizing the town. But after all that heartbreak, Reinhart hints that Riverdale’s princess might get her happy ending after all. “In the season finale, when you saw Betty and Jughead in bed together, she's smiling when he says, "Will you be my serpent queen?" [Aguirre-Sacasa] told me, ‘When I watched that scene and I saw Betty smile, it made me want more of that." Reinhart likes the sound of this storyline. “I think the girl deserves a break.”

Tyler Joe

Marysia swimsuit, Sea trousers, Gigi Burris hat, Derek Lam sunglasses, Snowe towel.



