The actors discuss their chemistry read, an unexpected Star Wars connection, and filming the climax of the romantic comedy.
Prime Video released the love hypothesis movie, bringing Ali Hazelwood’s bestselling book The Love Hypothesis to streaming audiences. Directed by Claire Scanlon, the romantic comedy stars Lili Reinhart as Stanford Ph.D. candidate Olive Smith and Tom Bateman as Dr. Adam Carlsen, an exacting young professor she recruits for a fake dating arrangement.
Reinhart, who also served as an executive producer on the project, said there was significant pressure to cast someone who matched the novel’s version of Adam. The role went to Bateman, whose real-life wife, Daisy Ridley, played Rey in the Star Wars films. Hazelwood originally wrote the novel as fan fiction about Rey and Kylo Ren. Bateman didn’t know about the book when he accepted the role, later telling The Hollywood Reporter that the coincidence was ‘kind of too nuts.’
Audition chemistry and Brazilian fans
The two actors established an easy rapport during their initial reading. Reinhart, 30, said Bateman’s theater school background gave depth to the dialogue, prompting her to immediately praise his performance to fellow producers. Bateman, 37, cited Reinhart as a major reason he signed on to the project. The pair recently traveled to Brazil for pre-release screenings and press, where enthusiastic crowds met them like rock stars.
Confronting harassment and writing the climax
The story turns when Harvard professor Dr. Tom Benton, played by Arty Froushan, sexually harasses Olive in a hotel room while offering her lab space for her pancreatic cancer research. Olive confides in her best friend Anh, played by Rachel Marsh, before Adam interrupts Tom’s lecture to confront him. Bateman told Deadline that exposing such abuses of power is necessary, explaining that misconduct can only continue when people conceal it.
Adam’s public confrontation leads directly to the film’s climax, where the couple admits their mutual feelings through scientific metaphors. Olive and Adam frame their romance as false positive and false negative test results, or Type 1 and Type 2 errors, concluding that Adam contaminated their experiment before they agree to start over. Reinhart told Deadline that the scene was ‘massaged up until the day we shot it,’ adding that the characters hid behind flowery science terms because showing genuine vulnerability was frightening.
