Interview: Lili Reinhart on ‘American Sweatshop’
When Riverdale wrapped its seventh and final season, Lili Reinhart closed a chapter that had defined much of her twenties. Her performance as Betty Cooper, the classic girl-next-door who had much more to her than initially meets the eye, is one that says she’ll always look back on with pride. “I know I’ll walk around and people will call me Betty probably until I die, which is fine,” she says. “I love Betty. It’s something that I wear like a badge of honor. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I was on a show that was beloved and crazy.’ So I have great pride in it.”
But finishing a series that ran for nearly a decade also meant starting fresh, stepping into a new wave of projects that reflect the kind of actor she’s ready to be now. Reinhart undoubtedly could have had her pick of projects following Riverdale. But instead of stepping into the obvious routes of superhero franchises or studio comedies, she’s leaned toward projects that feel riskier, smaller and more unsettling. American Sweatshop, directed by Uta Briesewitz, is perhaps her boldest move yet.
The film, which premiered at SXSW, follows a social media moderator Daisy (Reinhart) who is tasked with purging the most offensive content from the internet. When she finds a video she believes to contain a crime, she’s lured away from the safety of her keyboard and into a dangerous world as she obsessively seeks to hold someone accountable. Bold, intelligent and incredibly nuanced, American Sweatshop is a film that was designed to haunt you, to make you consider the hidden cost of the screens you scroll through every day.
Reinhart’s performance as Daisy is probably her most nuanced yet. We don’t get much of a backstory for Daisy. We don’t really see where she’s come from, what she’s been through, how she ended up working as a content moderator. But Reinhart imbues her with so much inner life that every single glance tells a story, every single line reading hints at much more beneath the surface. It’s a complex, deeply layered performance that will stay with viewers far after the credits roll.
Reinhart says it was the film’s script that drew her to the project after she initially stumbled upon it in spring 2024. “It was emailed to me,” she recalls. “And I read it pretty immediately. I get sent all these scripts and if the synopsis really jumps out at me, I’ll read it right away. Other scripts, I definitely let linger in my inbox. But this one I read pretty quickly. And I said, ‘Yes, let’s set up a meeting with Uta,’ who was attached as the director. She and I were actually supposed to work on a Black Mirror episode together, but I couldn’t make it work scheduling-wise, which was really heartbreaking for me. So it was nice to see her name circle back and come back into my world. We went out for some coffee in LA and had a really nice long conversation about the film and about kind of about this job as a content moderator and our own experiences seeing videos that stuck with us and kind of tortured us the way that my character goes through in the movie. After my meeting with Uta, I signed on. And then a few months later, we were in Germany shooting. So for me, most of my projects usually do not come together that quickly. I’m usually attached for like a year or more before I end up shooting. But this was a pretty condensed turnaround from getting sent the script to actually shooting it, which is nice. It’s nice to not have to wait forever to shoot something.”
American Sweatshop is claustrophobic by design, following Reinhart’s character and her colleagues through endless hours of monitoring violent, exploitative, and psychologically scarring videos. Reinhart is quick to point out the horror of their jobs, an actual profession that has a high turnover rate due to its grim nature. “It’s genuinely such a horrifying job,” she says. “And you would think that this is the one job AI could do, but apparently it can’t do it properly. So we have to torture humans by making them watch this content instead. You question why these videos are even on the internet and how humans could possibly make content like this, but they certainly do. So maybe [the film] will help advocate for more mental health support for people who actually do this job, for sure.”
The film has already started resonating with people. In addition to largely positive reviews (the film currently holds a 79% score on Rotten Tomatoes), the film also garnered a lot of attention following its trailer launch, particularly from people who worked as actual content moderators. “Even when our trailer came out, I saw a lot of comments of people saying, ‘Oh, I used to do something like this and it was absolutely traumatizing,'” she says. “And because it is a newer job, I think there hasn’t really been many films or shows that explore it. I think there’s been a play written about it, and maybe a few short films or maybe other films that I haven’t heard of. But there haven’t been many films that have tackled this topic of content moderation. It’s a newer topic and so I think people are really fascinated by it.”
American Sweatshop explores a darker side of the internet, one that people may unwittingly stumble into after falling down one too many rabbit holes. For Reinhart, the film dovetailed with a shift that was already happening in her own life. Once one of the most active young actors on social media, with over 20 million followers on Instagram, she had already begun pulling back before the film came along. Making it may have not sparked the change, but it did reaffirm it.
“I don’t necessarily know if shooting the movie itself has affected my relationship with the internet, but I do think just the last year in general, I’ve become kind of a hater towards the internet,” she says. “It changes by the day. Sometimes I think, ‘Yeah, social media is great and it unites people.’ But ultimately, I feel like the happiest people I know are people who are not super engaged online or don’t have social media at all. And those are people that I really admire because they didn’t get sucked into this world that is, I think, consuming and taking away a lot of our lives. I think we’re going to look up one day and realize that we spent years and years of our lives looking at a black box in our hands. And that’s pretty terrifying. So I’ve had that sort of realization the last few months, more than anything, that I would like to not feel like I lived a virtual life rather than a real one.”
By the time American Sweatshop came along, Reinhart was already in the middle of redefining herself. Two years out from Riverdale, she had been deliberately slowing down, choosing projects that felt challenging rather than safe, and waiting for the right moment to reintroduce herself to audiences in a new light. “I really have tried to be incredibly intentional about everything I do post Riverdale,” she explains. “I think when you do something that’s seven years of your life, you really want to be mindful about your time and also just how people perceive you after something like that, sort of breaking out of a mold of what people know you as. I’ve tried to be very selective and picky, and I have the privilege of being picky — I feel very lucky that I was able to be choosy with what I did after Riverdale. I hopped right into a limited series that’s finally now coming out. It’s kind of funny — I’ve been off Riverdale for two years, but just now the things that I’ve done are starting to come out. So it feels like almost a new wave of my career that I’ve been waiting for, which is really nice. I’m looking forward to the next year and having all the work that I’ve done finally come out and people see me in these different ways.”
That sense of intentionality also shapes the kinds of collaborators she gravitates toward. Reinhart has made a point of working with women behind the camera, especially those stepping into features for the first time. “I love working with female directors, and especially first-time feature directors,” she says. “In the last year, I’ve worked with three first-time feature directors, two of them being women. So that’s also just something that I keep in the back of my head, obviously championing women and women being in this field and pushing forward stories of complicated, fucked up women. That’s my jam.”
For fans who only know her as Betty Cooper, American Sweatshop might be a bit disorienting, especially at first. Reinhart’s performance is jagged, raw, and deliberately uncomfortable. But Reinhart doesn’t want to repeat herself. She wants to play women who are complex, flawed, and sometimes unlikable. “I think a good indicator for me that I should do something is if it scares me a little bit,” she says. “That’s usually a good sign I should do it.”
She admits she’s still figuring out what comes after Betty but based on American Sweatshop, it definitely seems like she’s on the right track.
AMERICAN SWEATSHOP will be released on demand on September 19.