The Love Hypothesis: Lili Reinhart says intimacy shouldn’t have a bubble of shame

Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman in ‘The Love Hypothesis’

Love is an antidote to all the hate," say Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman, who headline Prime Video's The Love Hypothesis. Based on Ali Hazelwood's 2021 bestselling romance novel, the film follows Stanford PhD student Olive Smith and notoriously strict professor Dr Adam Carlsen as their fake-dating arrangement turns real.

Despite its familiar trope, Bateman, sporting a Notting Hill (1999) T-shirt, believes such stories should be told repeatedly. "Whether you can find anything original [or not], there is something special about this story. There are only seven stories, and we often tell those same seven stories over and over again. I have seen so many romantic comedies, in fact, I am wearing one. But what spoke to me about this one was the honesty the two characters, who are different from each other, had. They see the world differently. It's a story about them accidentally falling for each other. [In life], we all want the same thing, love, safety, security, and peace. We just come about it from a different point of view," says the actor.

Bateman adds, "I do believe [the story] has been told repeatedly, and it should be told again. We'll never get sick of them because we're all here because of love."

The book devotes two chapters to Olive and Adam's intimacy. Asked about the film's female gaze and emphasis on consent in the scene, and Reinhart says she is not part of the select group of people "who don't want to see sex in their film and television". She adds, "You're going to put shame behind something if you never show it or never touch upon it. And I don't think something that is genuinely how human beings are created should have a bubble of shame around it." She says the scene was shot tastefully, from Olive's perspective as she initiates it. "It's done with care and love, and was important to Claire [Scanlon], our director, to shoot it that way."

Did you know?

Ali Hazelwood's book ‘The Love Hypothesis' was originally written as a Star Wars fan-fiction story about Rey and Kylo Ren, titled Head Over Feet. Hazelwood originally published it online under the name Ever-so-reylo