Tom Bateman on Favorite Rom-Coms, Lili Reinhart, and Making TikToks

A little over a year ago, Lili Reinhart posted a TikTok video from the set of The Love Hypothesis in which she and costar Tom Bateman acted out the “one-armed girlfriend lift,” a popular trend where the guy effortlessly scoops up his significant other using only one arm. It was one of our first looks at the on-screen versions of Olive and Adam, the enemies-to-lovers couple that set BookTok readers afire. At the time of this article’s publishing, the video has garnered over 84.5 million views.

“If 80 million people watch this movie, fucking great,” Bateman says emphatically over Zoom when I bring up the video’s virality. For the notoriously offline actor, participating in regular TikTok videos required some convincing at first, but “I guess if you’re gonna go into that world, who better to be holding your hand throughout it than Lili Reinhart, who has a small country of followers?” he says, flashing a grin. I’m happy to report Reinhart and Bateman’s viral TikToks have continued for the film’s press tour.

The 37-year-old English native lets out a laugh before launching into what he describes as a pretentious actor thing to say: “There was something in it that felt so inherently Olive and Adam. We are so different. Lil and I are from different parts of the planet. We come from such different places. She comes with this tidal wave of online followers, and I am flying this flag of ‘Be present and in the moment. Put your phone down. Get off the internet and look around.’ And in that meeting of these worlds, there was something quite beautiful about it.”

Indeed, it was apropos for the film’s “opposites attract” love story. Based on the New York Times best-selling book by Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis follows timid third-year PhD candidate Olive Smith (Reinhart)—who, in an attempt to make her best friend believe that she is on her way to happily ever after—convinces Stanford University’s infamously strict and brooding professor Adam Carlsen, aka Dr. Evil (Bateman), to pretend they are a couple.

It’s your classic “fake dating to lovers” trope, one we’ve seen play out on-screen many times before but never seems to get old. The Love Hypothesis sees the concept through the lens of lab coats, Bunsen burners, and carefully calculated theories as it explores love in many different forms.

The actor’s IMDb page mostly consists of psychological dramas, suspense thrillers, and whodunits. Known for playing dark, mysterious types, he was pleasantly surprised when his agent called him up and asked, “How do you feel about doing a rom-com?” While it’s not his usual fare, Bateman was intrigued when he heard director Claire Scanlon and Reinhart were attached. “I thought, ‘This sounds like great fun,'” he shares. Upon receiving the script, he immediately fell in love with the characters, particularly the journey Adam goes on with Olive, and liked that the story was so much more than just two people getting together. Scanlon described Olive and Adam’s relationship to Bateman as what happens when you reach over the divide to someone in a different place from you and learn from them and hear them. “I just thought, ‘What a beautiful place to start a story from,'” he says of the film’s themes.

We reach a point in our conversation where Bateman and I start trading favorite rom-coms. First on his list is The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. “I think it’s one of the most beautiful films ever made,” he says. I bring up my very millennial answer of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and he returns with another classic—Moonstruck starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. “The scene where she comes in and meets him for the first time, I have never properly seen love at first sight on camera until that,” he says. We both adore Love Actually (“It still gives me goose bumps”), and he adds that he recently rewatched some heavy hitters like The Wedding Planner with Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey.

At the heart of every one of these films are characters with undeniable chemistry. A great rom-com hinges on this very thing. Luckily, that bit was pretty instantaneous between Bateman and Reinhart.

He tells me the two first met via Zoom, which wasn’t exactly ideal, but as soon as they started reading together, it just clicked. “I thought, ‘[This is] ridiculous. Through a screen, I’m already getting more chemistry than I thought I would get,'” he says. “She’s got such warmth and depth, but she was so fun and silly. I didn’t want the Zoom to end because I was having so much fun reading with her.” Whether he got the role or not, Bateman tells me he was just happy to have had the opportunity to play and improvise with Reinhart.

The next day, he got the call that the part was his. “I was really excited for many reasons, but a very, very big one of them was because I got to do more of that with Lili, and it really was a delight working with her,” he says.

The two met in person in Montreal a week before filming started and spent the majority of that time sequestered in a room with Scanlon and creamy pastries supplied by Reinhart. The trio discussed each scene at length. “We’d sat with each other for hours and hours and days and days and gone to dinner and to the cinema,” he says. “We texted different movies we liked. I texted songs that I liked. It was just really collaborative and cool and fun and was a real luxury to get to know her before [filming].”

With any book adaptation worth its salt, staying true to the source material is key. So naturally, Hazelwood’s book served as the cast and crew’s bible throughout filming. I asked Bateman if he was nervous at all about appeasing the fans. He tells me it wasn’t so much nerves as it was added responsibility.

“It did make me think, ‘Wow, a lot of people are going to be looking forward to this before we’ve even called action on the first day, so get it right, man!'” he says. “We’re all here because of this book and the fan base behind it and the love that people have for it. And even though it’s a very fun, quick, lovely, heartfelt film and there’s a lot of silliness in it, you’ve got to treat that with the utmost respect.”

Love Hypothesis fans, you can breathe a sigh of relief.

The Love Hypothesis premieres on Prime Video on September 23.

Photographer: Graham Dunn
Stylist: Monica Murillo
Groomer: Sydney Sollod
Editor in Chief: Kat Collings
Creative Director: Alexa Wiley
Producer: Erin Corbett