A grid of side-by-side photographs that first circulated in early October went round again this week, pairing pictures Cole Sprouse took of Lili Reinhart during their relationship with later images of him and the Canadian model Ari Fournier. 'Cole Sprouse recreated photos he took of Lili in the SAME locations & same poses, with the gf he replaced Lili with,' read the post on X that pushed it into wide circulation.
The reaction has run heavily one way, with many readers saying that this behaviour is 'psychotic.' Another put it more plainly: 'Its giving im not over her and I gotta be weird about it.' Neither Sprouse nor Reinhart has addressed the comparison. The photographs are real and were posted publicly over several years, so what is in dispute is narrower than the reaction suggests: whether the resemblance was deliberate.
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The Phrase That Stuck
'Its hilarious, BIG "dont change her, replace her" energy,' one reader wrote, and that line was repeated across the threads that followed. Others went to the practical consequences. 'This is a good way to implode your relationship from the inside out and give permanent ick,' one wrote.
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One widely supported reply came from a reader describing the reverse situation in their own life. 'I had an ex girlfriend who enforced this. She was dead set on replacing every memory I might have had of my ex before her.'
Sprouse and Fournier Reportedly No Longer Together
There is a problem with the premise. Fournier is described throughout the viral post and the coverage that followed as Sprouse's current girlfriend, and there is reporting that says she is not.
Us Weekly reported in June, citing a source, that she and Sprouse had quietly separated and that she had been seeing the actor Thomas Doherty for several months. The pair were last photographed together in April 2025, having first been linked in January 2021.
Neither has confirmed the split, so the timing remains unclear. If the photographs span a relationship that has itself now ended, the framing of one woman being swapped for another describes something further in the past than the posts suggest.
The Argument That It Means Nothing
A smaller group pushed back, and their case was about how ordinary repetition is. 'There are only a certain amount of new things you can do,' one wrote, arguing that nobody deletes years of pictures after a breakup and that most people revisit the same places with whoever comes next.
The replies drew a line between the two things. Not deleting old photographs and revisiting a restaurant is one thing, one reader wrote, 'but if you recreate the photos like cole did, and if you only go to places you took your ex thats weird and creepy.'
What Sprouse Has Said About the Breakup With Reinhart
Sprouse, 34, and Reinhart, 30, met filming Riverdale and were together on and off from around the show's 2017 premiere until March 2020. He confirmed the split on Instagram on 19 August 2020, writing that he would 'always feel lucky and cherish that I had the chance to fall in love' and wishing her 'nothing but the utmost love and happiness moving forward'. In 2023 he called the breakup 'really hard for both of us' and said they were good friends, before adding that 'we both did quite a bit of damage to each other'.
Reinhart has been linked to Jack Martin since 2023, and her film The Love Hypothesis arrived on streaming in September, with her supporters visibly active since. The photographs had been sitting in public for years; the comparison is the new part.
