LILI REINHART'S STYLE FILE

As an actor, you have to be strong. You're criticised by literally everyone – strangers all over the world, casting directors, other actors in the casting room... You're constantly being judged, so need to be able to take that, and it's hard. I am a very reserved person, I don't really go out and party when I don't have to. I feel like I'm more of a cold energy, not super-warm and bubbly. I'm kind of introverted, a little shy, socially anxious and a little awkward, and that's fine. When people come up and want to take a photo with me, I feel pressure to live up to their expectation. I've been that person on the other side. I took a photo with Zac Efron in a doctor's office, which I am low-key embarrassed about, but now I feel this strange pressure to be 'on' all the time, immediately. I act for a living, but I'm not a performer 24/7. It's a matter of reminding myself, 'OK, you've got to turn it up for 10 minutes. You do what you gotta do to get by in the moment.'

I don't want people to think I have a 24-inch waist or that I'm OK with someone altering my body, because I'm certainly not. I wish so badly I could call out people retouching their pictures on Instagram and be like, 'Hey, you don't look like that! You're making these girls think that their waist needs to be inverted to be beautiful and it's so frustrating.' Millions of girls and boys are liking photos, thinking this is what beauty is, but it's not real. Growing up, I would have liked to have seen people with cellulite and love handles to look up to and think, 'Alright, maybe my fingers don't need to touch around the width of my arm for me to be beautiful.' 

When I post a photo of myself with pimple cream on, it's not only for fans, but for myself. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and touch my forehead to see if any cystic acne has appeared. It's something that I've dealt with forever. It sucks, and it's hard, but I'm trying to normalise it, by showing people that not everybody has perfect skin. This is what I look like. I don't look like Betty Cooper on a daily basis, you're not going to run into me on the street and see flawless skin and a perfect ponytail. 

Anxiety and depression run in my family, so the idea of therapy wasn't completely foreign. You have to treat mental illness like a physical illness. It's not something I'm ashamed of at all. I can tell you that I'm on antidepressants, I can tell you last week I fell into a depression again, no particular reason why. I hope the idea that someone can be depressed without having to justify it to anyone can be a more normalised thing – I want to be a voice for these younger people, to be like, 'That's OK, you don't need a reason, it just happens sometimes.' 

I've dealt with it a lot, people wanting to know things about my love life. I thought I was going to be the kind of person who would be OK talking about relationships, telling people what I do on dates, but that didn't end up being what I like to do. I'll talk about sex, about love, but I'm not going to talk about the relationship I'm in. It took a while to realise what I wanted to keep private, but right now, it's not going to happen. Keep a little mystery, come on!

 

The Autumn 18 issue of ASOS Magazine is out now – get your copy here.