Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman Unpack the Lore Behind The Love Hypothesis

Thanks to “Hollywood serendipity,” the actors are leading the highly anticipated film adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s beloved novel.

If you didn’t know better, you might believe the force that brought together Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman, stars of Prime Video’s highly anticipated film The Love Hypothesis, was some stroke of long-game marketing genius.

It started, you could argue, when an Italian neuroscience professor watched the Star Wars sequel trilogy that ran between 2015 and 2019, and fell in love. Subsequently, she tumbled into a notoriously passionate community of fans transfixed by the chemistry between Force-users Kylo Ren and Rey, portrayed by actors Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Widely recognized by the portmanteau “Reylo,” the “ship” launched a thousand and one fanfics, the ranks of which the neuroscience professor joined when she published “Head Over Feet” on Archive of Our Own in 2018. Later, she’d adopt the pen name Ali Hazelwood, rewrite and expand this story as an original romance novel, and publish a bestseller: The Love Hypothesis.

In 2024, Reinhart was on the set of the indie mystery-thriller American Sweatshop when she received a script for a rom-com adaptation. She’d never read The Love Hypothesis, and she was “trepidatious” about taking on a rom-com when she was enjoying her “indie moment,” she tells me. But the story’s main characters—Olive Smith and Dr. Adam Carlsen, the latter so named in homage to Driver—compelled her. Reinhart loved that the Stanford PhD candidate Olive chose to enter a fake-dating relationship with the brooding professor Carlsen, nicknamed “Dr. Evil,” as a show of loyalty to her best friend, Anh, who needed convincing that Olive wasn’t pining after Anh’s own crush. The actress respected the team attached: director Claire Scanlon of Set It Up and Mapleworth Murders, working from a script by Sarah Rothschild. Reinhart didn’t even know about the Reylo element until she’d already acquired a copy of the book.

“No one told me right away,” Reinhart says. “And then they were like, ‘Oh, by the way, this does have a fanfiction attached to it.’”

Reinhart—an adept observer of fan communities, given her experience in the CW series Riverdale, itself a fandom lightning rod—forged ahead. “There was something about the fact that people loved this book so much,” she says. “All rom-coms have a very common thread through them, which can feel stereotypical….This one felt more special to me.” She officially joined the project as a star and executive producer, which meant she had a say in casting decisions when the time came to conduct chemistry reads with would-be Adams in 2025. She read with several strong candidates, but it was Bateman who immediately stood out.

“I was scared and nervous,” Reinhart says of casting Adam. “It’s always so nerve-wracking to think, ‘Okay. I’m attached. Who wants to play second to me?’ It’s sort of like, ‘What man wants to play second to a woman who’s not an A-list [star]?’ I really pride myself on being very aware of where I stand and who I am in the industry…So trying to find a guy who wants to play second to a woman lead who’s me is a little daunting, because I also want to surround myself with people who elevate me.”

She continues, “I knew Tom was an amazing actor. And then he just so happened to have this incredibly strange connection to Daisy [Ridley].”

Herein lies the magic of what Bateman calls “Hollywood serendipity,” and what an outsider might confuse for a grand scheme: Bateman is married to Ridley. In The Love Hypothesis, he plays a version of a character written as a romantic counterpart to a version of a character played by his wife. When Bateman’s casting as Adam was first announced, via a viral TikTok posted by Reinhart, fans were quick to make the connection. And no matter how many times Bateman insists he and Ridley weren’t previously aware of the lore, those same fans find that “hard to believe.”

Reinhart laughs. “People genuinely think that Tom and Daisy knew about this,” she says. “If you knew both of them as I do—they did not know, I can tell you that with 100-percent certainty. They had other things going on in their lives. They didn’t know about the fanfiction.”

Bateman, once again, confirms this. He only found out about the Reylo factor after Scanlon offered him the role and explained what she called the “‘little link between you and this book,’” Bateman says. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She goes, ‘Well, not really you and this book. Your wife and this book.’”

He continues, “I remember the moment the casting broke because I mentioned it to Daisy. She was away filming when I was offered the role. And I said to her, ‘Do you know that there’s this book…?’ and Daisy also goes, ‘Huh. I think someone told me there was a book written because this woman likes the characters. But no, I didn’t really [know].’ And because it’s set in a university campus and the [characters] are scientists, I was like, ‘There’s no [obvious connection].’ I can see now, looking back, where the inspiration comes from. But no, I didn’t know.”

During an eight-week shoot in Montreal last summer, Reinhart and Bateman got to work making Olive and Adam their own. They spent an initial week on set getting to know each other, with Reinhart providing cakes for her, Bateman, and Scanlon to share during long conversations about Olive and Adam’s character arcs—and their love story, which Bateman says reminded him “a little bit of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. They’re these outsiders who are misunderstood by people. But in them trying to understand each other, we as the audience get to go, ‘Oh, there’s more to these people than meets the eye.’”

As production began, the co-stars soon became dear friends. “I don’t think Lili knew this, but she was very much one of the reasons I wanted to do [The Love Hypothesis],” Bateman says, adding later, “We are from such different worlds. I mean, literally, different continents, but our approach to the world and our view of it is so, so different. But it worked beautifully well on- and off-camera. We laughed so, so much, and talked about all kinds of things—about love. She talked about her boyfriend, who’s so sweet. I talked about my wife. It was a wonderful experience.”

Reinhart, clearly, agrees. “If you judge a book by its cover and you look at Tom—he’s tall and handsome, and has really dark features, and maybe doesn’t seem like he would be the friendliest person you’ve ever worked with on a set. And then he is.” She continues, “I genuinely still can’t believe that we found him.”

Below, the two actors discuss navigating the pressures of fan expectations; recording the on-set TikToks seen by an audience larger than the population of the United Kingdom, where Bateman is from; filming a highly anticipated hotel-room sex scene; and preparing to celebrate The Love Hypothesis’s fortuitous journey to the screen on September 23.Lenne Chai

“I was scared and nervous,” Reinhart says of casting her co-star.

On the challenge of adapting a beloved book for the screen:

Lili Reinhart: It’s hard to tread the line when talking about a book-to-screen adaptation. Anything that you say, people are like, “Oh, wait. So it’s not following the book?” I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about the adaptation in a way that comes off as respectful—because it is.

This is what I’ll say: For book-to-screen adaptations, I think what people are really looking for is not a play-by-play of the book, but rather the feeling that the book elicits for the readers. People want to feel, when they’re watching your movie, how they felt when they were reading the book. That’s giggling, and kicking their feet, and blushing for the other person, and getting excited to watch two people fall in love. And I think we really did that. I didn’t option the book. I am an executive producer, and I had my say to an extent, but I did what I could.

“I think what people are really looking for is not a play-by-play of the book, but rather the feeling that the book elicits for the readers.”
—Lili Reinhart

Tom Bateman: I loved that the script is an intensified and condensed and concentrated version of the book. It has to be—you’ve got an hour and a half to tell something that, if you told the book page-for-page, would be several hours long. But the DNA of it was all there. There weren’t any moments in the book that I thought, Oh, they’ve left that out! It was, Oh, that’s how they’ve adapted that! That’s how they’ve blended these moments together. That’s how they’ve highlighted this whole chapter into one line, one moment. There was elegant storytelling.

I’ve done a few book adaptations before. I’m doing one right now, as it happens. And as an actor, it’s a gold mine. If you only have the script, that’s all you have, plus conversations—if you’re lucky—with the writer and the director, improvising and thinking about these things, fleshing it out and putting meat on the bone. But with a book, if you ever go, “How am I feeling at this point?” You can just go back to the book and Ali Hazelwood tells you how he’s feeling.

On their approach to Olive and Adam:

LR: Olive’s an optimist, and I, unfortunately, am not. I’m trying. I’m working on it, but I’m wired a very different way. But the thing that we do have in common is loyalty. The whole plot revolves around Olive’s loyalty to Anh [played in the film by actress Rachel Marsh]. Anh is someone who came to save her from the trenches of being very emotionally alone, and so Olive feels indebted to Anh for giving her a best friend and a family. Any chance that Olive has to make Anh happy, to feel loved, to feel like she could go explore a relationship connection that she knows she wants, Olive is going to do it to the fullest extent.

I always have appreciated that: when people are extremely loyal and go out of their way for their friends. I like to say that Olive and I do have that in common. But she’s smart. I was horrible at science. Genuinely, it was probably my worst subject, so it’s ironic. I got really close with my hair and makeup team [on set], and I was like, “Can you believe I’m playing a Stanford scientist?”

TB: Adam is so talked-about and projected-upon as a person. The fact that he’s called Dr. Evil, everyone thinks they know everything about him. Before they’ve even stepped into his office, they think they know what this guy’s going to be like. But no one is born a bad person. No one is born Dr. Evil. It’s just how he’s perceived. I had to find a place where that came from.

And I think it came from, perhaps, in his past, if he did anything that expressed who he really was or showed vulnerability, it was met with mockery or judgment. So he slowly retracts. He’s waiting for the world to catch up to him, for someone to see him for who he really is, which is what Olive does. She is forced into the position of spending time with this man and seeing the world from his point of view. And she slowly realizes—and thus the audience does—that, “Oh, this guy actually means the best for people.”

On their viral TikToks:

LR: I was just coming off of Forbidden Fruits, where we had a social media person on set every single day, and they were doing TikToks, and I was really seeing how vital that is to marketing. But I was also seeing how out-of-touch some TikToks that people just recycle 30 times over and over again [can be], so I was like, “I’m going to not do these ideas that I’m being sent [for The Love Hypothesis].” I was being asked to make content to bank for later, and I went rogue, and I actually got a little smack on the wrist. But I was like…well, that was before I got 80 million views on a TikTok. And then people trusted me with the vision.

TB: Lili still laughs at the fact that I spell TikTok incorrectly in a text. I didn’t have any idea. She asked me to do a couple of them. There was the reveal of my casting: I just went, “What do I have to do?” And she goes, “Just do what I tell you.” I said, “Okay, fine,” and we did the hand thing.

Lili knows what she’s doing in that world. She’s so smart and creative at making those videos. She knew exactly what she wanted. We did quite a few takes [of the viral scooping-up TikTok]. I was going, “Lili, we’re doing more takes of this than we do in the fucking film. We’re doing 20, 30 takes of this.” She goes, “The scoop has to be right! It has to be this.” I knew, after the first TikTok video she did, that it was massive because my phone sort of blew up—text messages and voice notes from people. My sister was out in Australia and she just sent me a text going, “Why are you all over my Instagram?” and I said, “Sorry about that. I’m doing this film and it’s living quite strongly in that world. Maybe put a filter on and block my name from your algorithm. It’s going to get worse.”

LR: I didn’t have a list of things to do with Tom. It was as we started filming. I genuinely was trying to give him as little information as possible, because the more information you give, the more confusing it is to someone who has zero concept of TikTok.

On filming intimate scenes:

LR: I remember reading the [hotel-room] sex scene [in The Love Hypothesis] on an airplane, and it was funny. Jack, my boyfriend, was next to me, and I would show him a little bit of the chapter on the page. It was a visceral experience.

I have worked with mean people, and I can say: Tom is one of my favorite scene partners I’ve ever had, just in terms of always being game, always coming in with a great mood—the complete opposite of the character he’s playing. It was always incredibly comfortable, especially when you’re doing intimate things. There was not an ounce of discomfort and there was complete trust. We’re both in relationships that were completely respected on- and off-camera.

[The sex scene in The Love Hypothesis] is arguably the heftiest sex scene I’ve ever done. And that might be misleading, actually, because I don’t want people to think they’re about to see Blue Is the Warmest Colour, because they’re not. I think it’s important to say that having a very explicit sex scene would not have fit within the confines of the rest of the film. It just wouldn’t have made sense. When you have a sex scene that’s two chapters long [in the book], some people could have expectations of what it will be. So there was pressure. I actually probably felt the most pressure with the sex scene just because of how much people love it. That’s a very big draw to the book, and I understand that. Tom and I felt that. And I really pushed to be as sexy as possible while still making sense in the movie.

There’s something that’s a little bit disconnected from brain and body [about filming a sex scene]…I was naked with someone in a room—actually, multiple people—for six hours. And then I go home and sleep by myself in my bed, and I wake up alone, and I’m like, “Am I okay?” So I was checking in with myself, and I totally was—I felt very emotionally okay. It’s so paramount to do something like this with someone you trust, and that’s why I love Tom. I love him, and I’m so happy I got to do that [scene] with him. I felt that if I needed to talk to the intimacy coordinator [Jen Viens], she would have totally been open to do that. It is a wild experience and something that not a lot of people can relate to, in terms of filming [sex scenes].

“What I love about [intimacy coordinators] is they keep everyone safe and protected and secure. But what they actually do, too, is open up the scene for discussion.”
—Tom Bateman

TB: When [a sex scene] is gratuitous, it can be an uncomfortable thing for both actors and audience members. But when it is so deeply necessary to the characters’ arc, and it really was [in The Love Hypothesis], it’s the moment where language stops being enough. And in the world of intimacy coordinators, what I love about them is they keep everyone safe and protected and secure. It’s their job. But what they actually do, too, is open up the scene for discussion: actually talking it through like you would any other scene, like a dance or a fight or something. “How do you feel at this point? How can we express this? How do you feel when she touches you there? How do you feel when you kiss for the first time?” It makes the scene a rich, beautiful scene to play.

On anticipating the film’s release:

TB: [Prime Video] did a nice screening [of the film] in a nice cinema for me, and I loved it. I really did. I don’t love watching my stuff—I don’t usually sit down and watch everything—but I really enjoyed it. I messaged Lili straight away afterward. Quite a lot of the film I wasn’t there [on set] for—the parts with her and Rachel [Marsh]—and I thought it was so gorgeous. It had such a fun lightness of touch. I found it very moving. I hope fans get it because—reading it in the book, seeing it in the script, thinking about it in my head beforehand, and then playing it—it all felt like such a beautiful alignment.

LR: It really does feel like the most highly anticipated thing I’ve done since Riverdale. To be on the receiving end of that, as the actor, feels really special. I’m excited to go talk about it all September. It’s my birthday month. I’m turning 30! I get to spend the whole month talking about The Love Hypothesis and celebrating it. So I’m really going to try to soak it all in.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Via: ELLE