Lili Reinhart has revealed that a male director once asked her to “suck in” her stomach before a shot.
In a new interview with the cast of her latest film Forbidden Fruits, the Riverdale alum was asked if she was ever given an “acting note that she took personally”.
“When I had a male director come up to me and silently lean over and go, ‘Just suck in your stomach a little,’” Reinhart told Cosmopolitan.
Despite costars Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp offering to put a “hex” on him, Reinhart didn’t share the director’s name.
The Hustlers star said she didn’t believe his “intentions were bad”.
“I genuinely think he didn’t want me to look at the footage later and be, ‘Oh, someone maybe should have told me it was an unflattering angle,’” she said.
However, Shipp responded by saying it was up to the director and director of photography to “find a flattering way to shoot you, not to make your body your problem”.
Reinhart talked about her body image struggles last year, sharing that she had developed an eating disorder while filming Riverdale, which ended in 2023 after seven seasons.
“I really don’t like looking at season six imagery or pictures, because I know that 99 per cent of my thoughts were about my body,” she said during an interview with Self. “I was a thousand per cent just disassociated through that entire day or scene because my entire inner dialogue is just… ‘Your body’s changing.’”
Reinhart also opened up on social media about her struggle to accept the size of her arms, telling other women that they “aren’t alone” if they feel the same way.
“I wish there were more average-sized arms represented in mainstream media for women,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in September 2023. “My body dysmorphia has been going crazy because I feel like my arms need to be half the size they are currently?”
“We’ve glamourised these skinny arms that, for most of us, can only be achieved if you’re a literal adolescent,” she added. “I truly wonder how anyone survives or gets through this life without having severe BD. Maybe it’s a cruel amplified version in combination with my OCD, but damn. The amount of time I’ve wasted thinking about my arms in the last few months is insane.”
Reinhart also called out Kim Kardashian after the reality star revealed that she deliberately lost weight ahead of the 2022 Met Gala just to fit into a dress once worn by legendary actress Marilyn Monroe.
She described Kardashian’s admission as “so wrong” and “so f***** on hundreds of levels” as “millions of young women and women are looking up to you and listening to your every word”.
Explaining her decision to criticise the Skims founder, Reinhart said that she did it to call out “toxic behaviour” in the entertainment industry.
“I do not say the things that I say because I want to be relevant or get attention,” she wrote on X. “I speak up because I don’t see enough people with large platforms calling out toxic behaviour in our industry. Some people will never understand where I’m coming from and that’s okay.”
Directed by Meredith Alloway, Forbidden Fruits is a horror-comedy about a clique of retail workers who operate a clandestine witch cult inside a shopping mall, only for tensions to escalate when a newcomer disrupts their carefully controlled dynamic.
Forbidden Fruits is available in US cinemas now.
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