After a year without a magazine photoshoot or cover, Lili Reinhart starts 2025 with a full interview, photoshoot, and January cover for Self Magazine. I’ve added all the photos from the shoot in our gallery and you can read the full interview right below.

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SELFLili Reinhart Is Fighting for Her Health—and Yours

The actor has been navigating a medical mystery privately for years. She’s finally ready to talk about it.

If you’re one of Lili Reinhart’s more than 34 million social media followers, you’re probably familiar with the actor’s warm, but firm, social presence. She’s like your witty, charismatic big sister who’s as confident commanding an audience at the White House as she is taking down bullies in her comments section or speaking directly to her followers about mental health. Reinhart knows her audience—and isn’t afraid to advocate for them, or herself.

When I meet her at the Cara Restaurant in Los Angeles in early November 2024, Reinhart exudes a warmth I immediately recognize from her TikTok—she goes in for a hug the second I stand to greet her. Reinhart tells me she didn’t wear much makeup today because she knew she would end up in tears. “I was going to say to you the moment I walked in, ‘I hope you’re okay with crying,’” she says. “In my private life, when I cry, I really cry. That’s not something that’s very socially acceptable, as we know as women. We don’t fucking cry in public because it’s uncomfortable. But I knew I was going to cry today, and I didn’t feel nervous about it.”

We’re meeting in the afternoon on Thursday, November 7—the day after the 2024 presidential election was called for Donald J. Trump. Reinhart hasn’t been shy about letting her followers know exactly where she stands politically; on election eve, as Trump, someone who’s been found liable for sexual abuse, won state after state, Reinhart showed support for SA survivors. “I think these young men clearly have the wrong role model, and abusers are being rewarded,” she tells me. (Reinhart has previously talked about her own abuse from a male colleague in her teen years, though she’s avoided naming him.)

For Reinhart—and millions of other grieving Americans, including this author—defining the first week of November 2024 as triggering is an understatement. But the fact that we’re meeting on this particular day is just a cruel coincidence: Reinhart has been privately dealing with a debilitating, hard-to-pin-down health issue over the past four years. She says her doctors suspect that she has an autoimmune disease (though they’re not sure which one exactly) that’s causing several painful symptoms, or she may be dealing with the aftereffects of a previous infection.

Reinhart has been facing this frustrating situation privately, but decided to share it publicly now for a very personal reason: At the time of this interview, her grandmother had recently been diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. Reinhart says her grandmother received a diagnosis after months of uncertainty and advocacy on her own behalf. She says her grandmother’s doctors initially attributed her symptoms to old age. Fighting for care has been something Reinhart has found herself consumed with in recent years too.

“This is where the emotions are going to come out,” she tells me as her eyes start to well, her voice breaking a bit. “I’m here and I’m talking about my health because of my grandma, who is very currently dying, tomorrow or Saturday. I’m literally on standby for her passing away. My drive here, I’m texting with my mom about a funeral next week.

“What has motivated me to talk about her and to tell my story about my health was motivated by her.”

Though Reinhart’s physical health, and her quest for answers surrounding it, has taken precedence in recent years, she’s long been dealing with mental health struggles too—she’s had depression and anxiety since she was a teen. She experienced her first panic attack in the eighth grade. “I just remember being in my school bathroom, sitting in the stall. I think what my body naturally was trying to do was just catch its breath,” she recalls. “I remember it feeling like a sudden sense of dread.”

School continued to be a common site for those episodes. “It was triggered, I think, by social anxiety, and by feeling very trapped at school,” she explains. “I spent many a year in school going to the bathroom often to sit in the stall and use the toilet paper as tissue, and breathe, try to breathe.”

Reinhart started pursuing an acting career in childhood—something her parents supported, driving her the eight hours from Ohio (where she grew up) to New York City for open casting calls. “I just felt like this young girl with a big dream that was nearly impossible,” Reinhart says. “I was surrounded by people who just didn’t get me. I also think people knew that I was an actor, and it made me feel like an outcast because there was, I think, a perception of, ‘Oh, she must think she’s better than us,’ because I’m trying to be an actor, which is this glitzy and glamorous thing in my small town.

“Once you got to know me, I was definitely bubbly and funny, but I was socially anxious and shy, and it was hard for me to make friends,” she continues. “So I kind of would just choose to isolate myself, and I think it made school really hard for me.”

Whenever Reinhart felt a panic attack coming on, she’d try her best to keep things from boiling over and would “look up at the sky” and try to “blink the tears away.” She’d also sometimes pinch the skin between her thumb and forefinger (a stress-relieving tactic she’d heard about at the time). “That shit doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me, at least.”

In seventh grade, Reinhart was so miserable that she begged her parents to let her stay home from school (or even be homeschooled); at that point, she says, “they couldn’t ignore” that she was having mental health problems. They took Reinhart to see a therapist and a psychiatrist, who put her on an antidepressant.

Despite how dogged Reinhart was about chasing her dreams, her mental health struggles occasionally threatened to thwart that pursuit. “When I would tape auditions, the note would be like, ‘Can you have more energy?’” she says. “I’m, like, 16, I should have energy, and I didn’t. I think it was definitely due to the depression. But it was also, looking back, due to the medication.” (Fatigue can be a side effect of both depression and the drugs that treat it.)

Reinhart moved to LA at 18 knowing no one, but her first stint in Hollywood was short-lived—she left just six months later. “I was living in a shared house with a bajillion people, which is really hard,” she recalls. “I was kind of secluded in my little bedroom, and I didn’t have a car here. I was so depressed and anxious, I was throwing up every night and having panic attacks…. That was really where my depression and anxiety was starting to affect my physical health,” she notes. “Then, years later, it would get a hell of a lot worse.”

She returned home for six months, went to therapy, saved up some money, and then decided to try LA again. A month after returning, at 19, she got her big break: the role of Betty Cooper on Riverdale, a TV show inspired by the Archie Comics universe that would develop a cult following.

The fatigue Reinhart had dealt with for years was difficult to manage as she put in days on set that could go as long as 16 hours. “It was really hard to keep up, but I did,” she explains. “I didn’t have a choice, and I’ve always just showed up and done my job.”

While filming Riverdale’s fifth season in Vancouver, Reinhart had what she describes as a “bad” case of COVID-19. “Post-COVID, my fatigue was getting extreme,” she says, and her doctor grew concerned. “She was like, ‘Your chronic fatigue is suspicious, and you’re sleeping for 13 hours on the weekend when you can and taking naps. This isn’t normal.’”

Reinhart has tested positive for COVID three times in total and suspects she had it one additional time. With each infection, she says, her symptoms got more severe—and her fatigue kept getting worse. She says she’s had “vials and vials” of blood extracted over the years to figure out what’s going on. Her doctors have tried to rule out some autoimmune diseases, with no definitive answers. There are more than 100 different kinds of autoimmune diseases, and it takes an average of 4.6 years to get a diagnosis, per a study from the American Autoimmune Related Disease Association.

By the time 2022 started, and a few months into filming Riverdale’s sixth season, Reinhart was also dealing with new, unexplained gut issues and inexplicable weight gain. She’s been tested for Celiac disease, in which the gluten found in wheat, barley, rye, and other foods can trigger an intestine-damaging immune response, and Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disease that causes swelling and severe inflammation in the digestive tract. “I’ve done all of them,” she says. “And my gut’s still like, ‘Hey, bitch, you got something. You just can’t figure out what it is.’”

Reinhart says she also developed an eating disorder around this time. “I really don’t like looking at season six imagery or pictures, because I know that 99% of my thoughts were about my body,” she says. “I was a thousand percent just disassociated through that entire day or scene because my entire inner dialogue is just… ‘Your body’s changing.’”

Earlier this year, Reinhart’s hair started falling out. “I went to my dermatologist because my scalp was also getting kind of itchy. She was like, ‘Yes, it’s alopecia.’” While some types of alopecia are hormonal (a.k.a. androgenetic alopecia), others can be autoimmune-related, like alopecia areata. This is when a person’s body attacks their hair follicles, causing patchy hair loss.

As many folks who’ve been poked and prodded in search of a medical diagnosis can likely relate to, Reinhart has run into her fair share of less-than-helpful care (though she also speaks warmly of the current care she’s receiving as well as prior experiences with doctors who were attentive and helpful). While seeking treatment for her alopecia, she says one doctor seemed to suggest she go off her birth control and get pregnant to spur hair growth. She says another provider asked her if she’d been in any shows or movies he’d know, ultimately having a nurse Google her name as she sat there, waiting to be seen. “I understand this is a story that’s not very relatable,” Reinhart tells me (to which I immediately interject to say that feeling objectified under hard fluorescent lighting in a sterile waiting room is achingly relatable), “but just how dehumanizing being at a doctor’s office can be. I’m not here for small talk, I’m here for help.”

Reinhart is also aware that even having access to care is a privilege in the US, and hard-to-diagnose health problems aren’t cheap. She mentions a time that she was quoted $2,200 out of pocket for an initial consultation with a doctor who didn’t take insurance. “Even if I can afford this, I want no part in that,” she tells me. “It is so expensive to be sick. And that’s why women don’t get help. That’s why men and women don’t get help.”

Reinhart’s health struggles came to a head this past July while in Germany filming a movie. “The third night I’m there, I developed symptoms of a UTI,” she explains. “I’m like, ‘I’ve had UTIs before. I’m a woman. We all know how it feels.’” Reinhart went to the hospital by herself at 4 a.m., where doctors performed a urinalysis. She says they found a “slight infection” and sent Reinhart on her way with some antibiotics. But the urgency to pee (the hallmark sign of a UTI) didn’t let up. She ended up going to the hospital two more times, again, thinking she had a UTI. “The second I’m done peeing, I still feel like I have to pee, but my pee is showing up with no infection,” she says.

Sometimes, Reinhart notes, the antibiotics would work for a little while, but within a couple of days, the symptoms would return. When she got back to LA, Reinhart “went straight from the airport to the urologist,” who, again, found no sign of a UTI. “I was, at this point, going back and forth between my gyno and my [urologist],” she notes, adding that she was driving an hour to appointments. “It was just like, I need to find a urogyno specialist. And I found one and I called—and this is mid-September at this point—and they’re like, ‘Okay, she can see you October 30.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that because I’m literally dying.’”

When Reinhart spoke at the White House about mental health awareness in October 2024, she spent the night sobbing in her hotel bathtub as her boyfriend, Jack Martin, sat on the floor beside her, holding her hand. “That’s the ironic thing that people don’t see,” she tells me. “I’m literally in Washington, DC, at the White House giving a speech on mental health. And then that same night, I am sobbing, in so much discomfort, and feel so defeated.”

That same month, Reinhart flew back home to Ohio as her grandmother’s health was deteriorating. Because of that, she didn’t dress up with her Riverdale costars, Camila Mendes and Madelaine Petsch, for Halloween (the three have famously donned trio getups in past years, including the Hocus Pocus sisters in 2022). Fans on TikTok wondered where she was: “Healthwise, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to leave my couch. But I’m not going to tell the world that,” she says.

Around this time Reinhart also got a cystoscopy, a procedure in which a doctor examines the lining of the bladder and urethra to see what might be going on. The result? “No tumors, no cysts, just a lot of inflammation,” Reinhart recalls. “It’s like you almost hope there’s something in there so you can remove it and feel better.” Reinhart’s doctors believe she has interstitial cystitis (IC), which is a chronic disorder where a person’s bladder or bladder wall becomes irritated and inflamed. It can have a long-lasting impact on a person’s quality of life.

Per the CDC, IC affects about 1% of people in the US, mostly people with vaginas. But it can take years to get a diagnosis. That’s because IC is often mistaken for things like UTIs. It also doesn’t have a cure and can be difficult to treat, though symptoms can go in and out of remission. Reinhart says she’s doing weekly bladder instillations, which is where a doctor inserts a catheter filled with medicine into a person’s urethra to help relax pelvic and bladder muscles to treat symptoms.

“No one ever knows what that is when I talk about it,” Reinhart says. “But my urogyno is telling me so many women have this, and that’s why I think it’s as important as it is to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m dealing with it too.’”

This past fall, Reinhart released a skin care line called Personal Day—amid everything *gestures tiredly* going on. It was borne from her struggles with cystic acne, something she’s dealt with since childhood, and the search for products that won’t make her skin flip out. (The website features an “ingredient checker” that allows you to input a skin or beauty product’s ingredient list and flag potential acne-triggering add-ins.)

When I ask her how she wants her line to make people feel, she pauses. “I hope they feel seen,” she says. “People with acne don’t feel seen, and also don’t want to be seen, when they’re breaking out. So I really do hope the products make people feel that their feelings towards acne are very real, and that these products were crafted by people who understand.”

As our conversation shifts toward the ways that highlighting her health struggles might help others, Reinhart’s demeanor shifts. It’s clear she’s nursing some raw, emotional wounds, and understandably so, but she’s now more animated—and her voice doesn’t waver. “I feel strong and happy about the mental health advocacy that I’ve done, and I feel happy that I’m about to bring physical health into that conversation because I know that getting help for women over the next four years is going to be exponentially more difficult,” she says. “Listen to your body, and don’t take no for an answer. Don’t let a doctor tell you that nothing’s wrong when you know that there is.”

Reinhart says that when her grandmother went to see a health care provider around April 2024 for bloating and constipation, her doctors thought she was having digestive woes because she was 85—when cancer was the true culprit.

“She had symptoms in March and April and was diagnosed in September,” Reinhart says. “Yes, I’ve been dealing with an incredible amount of health issues the last few years, but I was never really feeling super motivated to talk about them until this happened.”

A few days after this interview, Reinhart’s grandmother, Corine Reinhart, passed away. “My grandmother knew something was wrong,” Reinhart tells me. “She said, ‘Run tests.’ I’m sure that a part of my advocacy for women must come from that.

“I just think, Wow, damn…I’m so proud to be her granddaughter.”

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