Lili Reinhart Called Out “Clickbait” About Her Breakup and Depression
“I would never speak so candidly about something as personal as a breakup.”
Lili Reinhart is setting the record straight. (Not the first time she’s had to do that.) The Riverdale actor recently opened up to Refinery29 about her experience with depression, though it seems some media outlets have attributed quotes about her mental health struggles to her recent, reported breakup with Cole Sprouse. In true Reinhart fashion, she is not having it: On Twitter yesterday, August 18th, she called out those sites for misusing her quotes as “clickbait.”
“Quotes taken from my most recent interview are not about a ‘breakup.’ They are about the depression I’ve felt over these last few months. Tired of people taking my words out of context and piecing together their own story for clickbait,” Reinhart tweeted.
In a follow-up tweet, she further clarified, one more time for the people in the back, that she would never “speak so candidly” about something so private as a breakup—and that she was, in fact, “addressing [her] depression.”
In the Refinery29 interview, Reinhart compared her experience with depression to a “black tunnel [that] was never going to end.”
“I couldn’t see the light,” she continued. “I was like, I feel like I’m dying. It was fucking rough, and there’s no other way through it than just through it. I’ve seen a lot of people when it comes to heartache and grief and breakups, and they try to get that void filled with sex, with coke, with food, with drinking, [but] the void is still there. I took the road less traveled and just dealt with my shit. I had to face my own pain head-on.”
Reinhart is regularly open about her mental health. Back in 2019, she shared on her Instagram Stories that she’d returned to therapy to seek help for her anxiety and depression, the latter of which she’d been diagnosed with when she was 14.
But even with professional help, Reinhart shared with Refinery29 that the past few months have been incredibly difficult, which we totally get, since the world is crumbling around us. Though Reinhart did reference that “leaving a relationship,” as Refinery29 reports, didn’t necessarily make things easier.
“The last couple of months have probably [been] the most emotional few months of my entire life,” Reinhart said.
“My therapist [told] me, ‘Your body’s going through withdrawal from love…You’re used to having this exchange of happy chemicals between you and the person that you’re with.’”
The latest update on the saga that is media speculation surrounding Reinhart and Sprouse’s breakup occurred in May, when Dylan Sprouse (that would be Cole’s twin brother, for the somehow still uninitiated) seemingly confirmed the breakup in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. That followed a few other media outlets who reported that Reinhart and Sprouse had ended their three-year relationship at some point before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Obviously, there is much, much more to Lili Reinhart than her relationship status. (Like, how about the fact that she’s one of the most successful young actors working today?) And with her career on Riverdale “having so totally occupied the past four years of her life,” Refinery29 writes, Reinhart is taking the opportunity during quarantine to pause and reflect on her wild ride over the past four years.
“This has been the first time in four years where I’ve been able to like stop and process the immense life changes that I’ve gone through,” she said.
While Riverdale is on pause—and Reinhart is taking some much-needed time to reflect—we can catch her in her upcoming project: She’s starring in and executive proucing Chemical Hearts, a movie based on the novel of the same name by Krystal Sutherland, which’ll be released on Amazon Prime on August 21st.
