When Lili Reinhart first received the script for Cooper Raiff’s “Hal & Harper,” she was at a crossroads as she entered into production on the final season of “Riverdale,” searching for her next project and hoping not to be pigeonholed from her seven-season run on the teen CW drama series.
The script, which she notes was the best she had ever read, was “exactly the type of tone” Reinhart was hoping to pursue after wrapping “Riverdale,” but it was a project she knew was rare to come by, especially given her background.
“I was in a position at that point where I wasn’t really getting opportunities like that,” Reinhart told TheWrap. “When we had this first conversation, I was like, ‘I feel really lucky that you’re seeing me through this lens of this woman, who’s a flawed woman and emotional and in this world, when most people know me from ‘Riverdale’ and [put] a little bit of a label on me, as far as what my wheelhouse is as an actor.’”
The indie TV series, which was acquired by Mubi following its Sundance premiere, follows codependent siblings Hal (Raiff) and Harper (Reinhart), who stumble through growing pains into early adulthood and grapple with a complex relationship with their father (Mark Ruffalo). As viewers piece together the family’s traumatic past, much of the series includes quiet reflection on the siblings’ childhood as well as their current desires and relationships.
“Cooper really lets the silence speak for itself, and to be honest, that was something that I remember loving and craving after being on a show like ‘Riverdale,’ where there’s no silence at all,” Reinhart said, adding that one Letterboxd review said half of the series was Harper taking a bath (“you’re not wrong,” she responds). “The type of content and movies that I watch are a lot more quiet and slow, and I think because you’re watching humans process emotions, and that’s often a very silent thing.”
In the year or so Reinhart had to prep for “Hal & Harper” prior to production, she took a step towards embodying Harper by reading “Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss,” which she says gave her insight on what it might be like to embody the role of a mother, and in some ways, a wife, to Harper’s brother and father following the loss of her mother. The year of prep time also enabled her to establish a level of familiarity with Raiff, who would soon play her on-screen little brother.
“He and I just naturally had very sibling energy,” Reinhart said, recalling that earlier in the morning she was calling him to answer her texts. “I don’t have a brother — I have two sisters, and he feels like a spiritual brother to me. I feel lucky to have a very talented spiritual brother who wants to work with me as an actor.”
Beyond developing their sibling dynamic, the prep time also helped Reinhart craft a deep level of trust with Raiff, who created, wrote and directed the entirety of the eight-episode series. “I knew what he wanted this to be, and I knew the love he had for each character and for the story, and when someone loves and cares about something so much, you ultimately just surrender to that,” she said. “I just really trusted how he wanted Harper to be seen.”
Reinhart also credited Raiff with reminding her to be in her body, noting that he would use a hand gesture pointing to his chest that would signal Reinhart to feel the emotional depth of what Harper was going through at the moment. “That’s something that I … looking back, really appreciate, and have taken with me honestly into other jobs, reminding myself to be present in my body,” Reinhart said, noting she’s been trying to avoid looking at her phone on set in an effort to stay present.
One thing Raiff didn’t reveal to Reinhart in their initial meeting was that during the multiple flashbacks of Hal and Harper in grade school, Raiff and Reinhart would be playing the younger versions of the characters in their adult form, surrounded by other elementary-school aged children. While Reinhart admitted there was a discomfort in acting opposite a bunch of children, the challenge was “an actor’s dream” as she approached playing Harper’s younger version quite differently than the Harper we meet in her mid-to-late twenties.
“She’s quite emotionally stunted and doesn’t let her emotions come out, and … if she has emotions, doesn’t really sit there and feel them — she’s always in caretaker mode, and that often doesn’t leave space for your feelings,” Reinhart said of young Harper. “I’m lucky that Harper wasn’t this social butterfly nine-year-old, because I think it would have been very hard for me to play a kid version of her who was very outgoing. It was a lot easier to play an uncomfortable version of her … because I, as a then-26-year old-woman, was playing a nine-year-old, and I felt uncomfortable around children … my environment really helped me create the narrative of [being] uncomfortable in my own skin.”
Reinhart applauded Raiff for the bold choice to use the device for a more emotional arc, noting that the situational comedy worked well in “Pen15.” “I didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Reinhart said. “Cooper’s talked about how it’s up for debate whether what you see in the show of them as children actually happened … you don’t necessarily know if that’s quite the story of how things went as a kid in terms the dynamic with their dad.”
The childhood scenes with Hal and Harper dealing with their aloof father after their mother passes help set the scene for the loving, yet slightly stunted relationship between the siblings and their dad, played by Ruffalo, who Reinhart says exceeded her already high expectations while shooting.
“Someone at his level doesn’t have to show up as hard as he did for an independent television show,” Reinhart said, adding that none of the cast members were in it for the money. “We felt like his children, and we really deeply cared about him and that he cared about us.”
As Harper grapples with boundaries and past traumas in her relationship with Hal and her father, she’s also forced to confront her relationship with her girlfriend Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott) as the couple, who met early on in college, weigh the life they would like to have and whether that future includes the other. It’s a storyline that Reinhart said is resonating with viewers who might be going through breakups in their 20s.
“When you’re with someone through any part of your twenties, you’re still getting your sea legs in life, and when you have someone on that journey with you, and then ultimately, you know, you’re outgrowing them, but you feel almost like you couldn’t possibly leave them, because it’s a betrayal to your former self or to that person,” Reinhart explained. “It’s so hard to leave a relationship because you’ve outgrown it … it’s just easier to hate someone in a breakup and move on that way. A breakup is so painful when it’s mutual love and choosing to separate because you just don’t fit in each other’s lives anymore.”
Just as “Hal & Harper” was difficult to make within the confines of its indie budget, Reinhart noted it’s been hard “every step of the way,” including getting people to venture out of their Netflix viewing to support an indie TV show. “‘Riverdale’ is just in Netflix perpetually … people just are going to watch it, whereas getting people to watch an independent show that feels emotional and a bit more of a slow burn is really hard, but I’m really glad that I did it and took that turn,” she said.
Reinhart also praised “Hal & Harper” for marking “the beginning of the next chapter in my career,” adding that she’s filmed three drastically different movies in the last year — horror film “Forbidden Fruits,” romance adaptation “The Love Hypothesis” and comedic thriller “The Very Best People.”
“This whole project to me was such … I feel so lucky, because it’s exactly what I want to do forever — I want to do a little bit of everything,” she said.
“Hal & Harper” is now streaming on Mubi.
