Lili Reinhart survived outrageous storylines on ‘Riverdale.’ She still wants to keep you guessing.

Lili Reinhart has done a lot in her young career. She’s solved a murder, temporarily gained superpowers and performed a striptease while singing “Mad World” at her boyfriend’s father’s retirement party. One time, she even took down an organ-harvesting cult after finding out she had a rare gene that made her predisposed to becoming a serial killer. But that was all in Riverdale, the soapy teen thriller series that catapulted her to stardom at age 20, playing the brilliant girl next door, Betty, for seven seasons.

Since the monumental show’s end in 2023, the now 29-year-old Reinhart likes to stay busy. She’s filmed three movies this year, and she’s currently promoting a new series, Hal & Harper, now streaming on Mubi.

“I felt so lucky and a little confused that he wanted me to be a part of a project that felt so special, but also very grounded and real, and given my previous work … I hadn’t done anything that felt tonally like that at all,” she says. “I’m always a little bit flattered and confused when someone wants me to be in their movie.”

Although it may seem like Reinhart has already tackled every possible outlandish plot point that an actor could face in Riverdale, Hal & Harper is a wholly different challenge. It’s a slow-paced, emotional show that follows two codependent siblings (Reinhart and the show’s writer-director, Cooper Raiff) as they forge their own paths in life despite lingering grief from a childhood tragedy. It’s quiet, prestigious and independently made — everything that Riverdale was not. It’s so different, in fact, that Reinhart didn’t really understand why Raiff, who’s known for his intimate dramedies, reached out to her.

After being approached, Reinhart quickly devoured the entire 300-page script for the series, which she called “the most special story” she’s ever read, moved by the authenticity of the dialogue and the unique cadence of the script. As a producer and actor with name recognition and a built-in army of fans watching her every move post-Riverdale, Reinhart says she won’t move forward with a project unless the writing grips her. As a result, she’s done a lot of indie movies you may never have heard of. That’s how she likes it.

“I got a text the other day: ‘Hey, would you be interested in a really large IP franchise?’ And my first comment was, ‘Well, I have to read the script,’” Reinhart says.

She eventually found out that Raiff cast her because of the physicality he saw in her — he liked the way she took up space. Raiff wanted Harper to feel “rooted in the ground and really sturdy … like a tree” — a foil to a tumultuous Hal, played by Raiff himself (Mark Ruffalo plays their single dad).

Reinhart shrugs as she recounts this, not really sure what makes her this way. But it was key in helping her pull off the twist in Hal & Harper, in which she portrays both the grown-up version of her character and the 9-year-old version the audience sees in flashbacks. Putting on overalls got her in the zone, and being around actual children made her feel a little awkward. She’s on a quest to play as many different characters as possible, so she might as well check 9-year-old off the list.

“I want to have a really interesting, fun career and I want people not to know what the hell I’m gonna do next,” Reinhart says. “The moment someone puts an expectation on me in my career or if I put an expectation on myself, I’m gonna stop having fun.”

She recently filmed what might be her most anticipated project yet: An adaptation of the book The Love Hypothesis, a romance novel that originated as a work of Star Wars fanfiction and has a cult following on TikTok. When I admit I’m also a fan, she responds: “So is everyone!”

“Sorry that sounded cocky of me. I only say that because … people weren’t even that excited about Riverdale the way they were about this,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Damn, that’s a lot of pressure. Hope you guys like it … if not, too late!’”

Reinhart, who has 7.5 million followers herself on TikTok, knew the book was a sensation — but then she went down the rabbit hole of watching videos about it, analyzing how fans said they wanted the movie to be cast. She got nervous — they were filming as TikTok was teetering on the verge of a possible ban. So she started posting about it as much as possible, hoping to harness the platform’s power and obsession.

“I got in a little bit of trouble because I was doing it without anyone’s permission,” she says. “I went rogue.”

It worked. The internet is now feral with anticipation for a movie that doesn’t even have a release date yet. The announcement video garnered 25 million views, while the clip of her costar Tom Bateman sweeping her off her feet with one arm prompted commenters to post memes of women with their jaws hanging open and ripping their shirts off. It now has 75 million views. It’s that serious.

Reinhart’s willingness to post frequently and whimsically about what she’s working on is something her peers don’t necessarily possess — and it’s something she picked up during her tenure on Riverdale. For all of its quirkiness and chaos, the show made her who she is: a producer and actor who only ever does what she wants, but still knows what her audience wants from her.

She may have graduated from the weirdest show on the block, but it has made her an innovator.