“This is so exciting,” the actor Lili Reinhart said. “I’ll actually smell like something for once.”
Reinhart, who broke out on the teen soap “Riverdale,” was sitting at the counter of the Fragrance Shop, an East Village institution that allows customers to custom-blend their own scent. She has never worn fragrance. “There’s something about me wanting to smell like me and not like something someone else smells like,” she said. But she felt ready to try.
With the help of a perfumer, she chose from among dozens of jars, selecting base notes: Sugared Pistachio, Pink Sugar Kiss and Sweetheart Vanilla. “So we’ve got a sweet tooth,” the perfumer said.
Reinhart agreed. “I just had two doughnuts on the way over.” Her outfit, a bright blue tank worn with jeans, and her swingy blond hair also signaled sweetheart.
Yet Reinhart, 30, who has graduated to grown-up roles with “The Love Hypothesis” (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), doesn’t think of herself as exclusively sweet. For a celebrity, she is unusually open about her experience of physical and mental illness and frank in her self-assessment. “If someone were to describe me in a handful of words, sweet would not be one,” she said. “I’m a romantic, I’m hard on myself, I am earnest, I’m blunt, I’m overwhelmed. And I’m still figuring it out.”
She lent many of those qualities to Olive, the heroine of “The Love Hypothesis,” which is based on the best-selling book by Ali Hazelwood. Olive, a graduate student and cancer researcher who once memorized the periodic table just for fun, pretends to date (and then, in the way of romances, actually dates) a professor (Tom Bateman) in her department. These are biologists with chemistry.
Reinhart’s final perfume recipe allowed for complication, mixing those base notes with Wildflower and just a hint of White Tea. “For a whisper of something romantic,” she said. Reinhart, who formerly dated one of her “Riverdale” co-stars, is now in a relationship with the actor Jack Martin. “I’m in the most romantic relationship I’ve ever been in, because I’m with a man who is so unafraid to be in love,” she said.
She sniffed the finished mixture. “It smells sweet, it smells innocent,” she said. She decided to name it “inner child.” With the scent dotted on her pulse points, she discussed love, fame and going brunette.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You wanted to perform from a very young age. Why?
LILI REINHART I’m not the type of person who likes being the center of attention. As a kid I did theater and that felt very exposing. But it did feel validating. I got to express something inside of me that wasn’t being expressed anywhere else.
You started on “Riverdale” as a teenager. What was that like?
REINHART I’m waiting for the day I get sent a project where I am doing something I haven’t done on “Riverdale.” I have genuinely, within “Riverdale,” done horror, action, fantasy, time travel, superpowers, high school, musicals.
You were romantically involved with a co-star, which was excessively documented. What was it like to be in the public eye?
REINHART I was so young. I have a much better relationship to it now. I tread the line of sharing what I want to share and being private when I want to be private and trying to not bring up the past so much. I honestly don’t remember that much of that time. When a lot of trauma is coming at you, and I do look at my early 20s as being quite traumatic, you don’t remember a lot. At this point, I feel so much steadier.
How did “The Love Hypothesis” come to you?
REINHART I was in an indie frame of mind, trying to set myself apart as a serious actor. I didn’t want to do horror, I didn’t want to do a rom-com, because then you’re pigeonholed into a scream queen or a romantic lead. But I read the book and I loved it.
We live in a culture that often denigrates romance as girl stuff, as frivolous. Why do love stories matter?
REINHART Every person experiences love. Woman, man, any gender. These movies keep the hope alive that you can still meet and connect with people.
What’s the lesson of “The Love Hypothesis”?
REINHART The movie is about seeing two people who view the world in completely different ways falling in love with each other and beginning to see the world through the other person’s eyes and how important that is in a world where no one wants to see through anyone else’s eyes. And these two people are able to fall in love purely because they’re under a ruse. The ruse allows them to be fully themselves because the pressure has been taken off. I don’t know if they would have fallen in love otherwise, because it’s scary.
What was it like going brunette? Are there not blond scientists?
REINHART That was a wig. I love wigs. I have very tricky hair. I knew we were going to shoot in the summer. It was going to be hot and humid. So I said, I want to wear a wig. The only reason she’s brunette is because it says in the book that she’s a brunette. In another world, she could have totally been blond. I never would have said, Oh, because she’s a scientist, she needs to be brunette. In fact, we talked about various shades of brunettes, and I was like, no, not too dark. There has to be a lightness to it.
What would you like to do next?
REINHART I’m trying to manifest a period piece, because it’s been my dream my whole life to be in one and I grew up watching “Moulin Rouge!,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” every Keira Knightley movie. A giant, beautiful period piece, that’s what I would love. And I would like to do more romance. It’s been really nice doing a press tour talking about love. Talking about love while being in love is a really nice thing.
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