Cara Delevingne sits in the lobby of an arts venue in Manhattan, her black beanie hat pulled down so low that her world-famous eyebrows are barely visible. She is dressed for anonymity, not attention. She wears burgundy joggers, black trainers and a black, cushiony Staud sheepskin jacket, which envelops her like a weighted blanket.
In person, Delevingne’s casual dress and general skater-kid energy make a compelling contrast with her million-dollar face. Her huge, blue eyes pull focus at all times. Picture Elsa from Frozen vaping, in a beanie, wearing Nike x Supreme Air Force 1s, and you’ll get the idea. In an inversion of her high-fashion life, Delevingne’s armour is not glamour but comfort. She is a trainer enthusiast – she has at least 40 pairs – and she loves vintage band T-shirts. She gets ‘very attached’ to certain items, like today’s jacket.
Her sheer presence explains why anonymity is never really an option for Delevingne: within moments, a quartet of excited middle-aged British men holding champagne glasses materialise at the end of our table. ‘Hello Cara,’ they say, visibly dazzled. ‘We just wanted your... feedback.’ The men shake her hand, one by one, and sit on the sofas next to us – one perches on the coffee table – and fire off questions about the show we have just seen. ‘This is my second visit,’ she says. ‘I cried the first time.’ They nod, and keep asking questions, which she answers warmly and thoughtfully. One brings over a champagne bottle and offers her a drink. She demurs, quickly, politely.
The men, I soon learn, work on Sonic Sphere, the immersive production Delevingne and I have just seen. It’s a sound-and-light installation, held within a ball, 65 feet in diameter, which is suspended in a dark, cavernous amphitheatre. Together, we entered the orb and lay, side by side, on mesh sheeting, listening to dreamy electronic music and watching pulsating, kaleidoscopic lights ripple across our peripheral vision. It was a trip: all-enveloping and meditative. Afterwards, as we disembark via a 50-foot metal staircase, Delevingne explains why she chose it for our rendezvous. She says she’s spent the past few months immersing herself in theatre, music and art, seeking out novel cultural experiences for inspiration and sustenance. ‘I’m able to live in a way that I never thought I would be able to,’ she says, ‘where I can really experience things and engage with them. I never thought I would be able to enjoy anything this much.’
At 30, Delevingne says she has entered a shiny new era. The big change is sobriety, which she embraced nine months ago. She won’t say it has been easy. ‘It hasn’t, but there have never been moments when I’m like, “This isn’t worth it.” It’s been worth every second. I just don’t know what it would take for me to give it up. I am stable. I’m calmer.’ She has learned a lot, she says. ‘That I’m resilient as hell. That anything is possible. I think I used to say that and not believe it. But now I really believe it.’
Throughout her life, Delevingne has suffered from periods of anxiety, depression and substance misuse, but things came to a head in September 2022 when she was photographed looking frail and fraught after the Burning Man festival, before checking into rehab. She spoke publicly about her struggles soon afterwards. She says talking about it ‘after vowing to be honest about things like depression and anxiety’ felt like a weight being lifted. ‘For a long time, I felt like I was hiding a lot from people who looked up to me.’ So she took a break. ‘To disappear and come back for air,’ she explains. ‘I finally feel as though I can be free and myself, fully.’
Anyone who only knows the outline of Delevingne’s career as a enormously successful supermodel-turned-actor may be unaware of any difficulties in her life. Her mother, Pandora Delevingne, suffered from heroin addiction and bipolar disorder throughout her daughter’s childhood. After signing with Storm Management in 2009, Cara was pole-vaulted to global fame as the face of Burberry’s SS11 campaign: almost overnight she became the ‘it’ model of the moment. Her success collided with the rise of social media; her huge following and irreverent attitude made her a star of the Instagram generation. Her luxuriant eyebrows were not just her trademark – the millennial equivalent of Cindy Crawford’s mole – but sparked a small industry of YouTube tutorials, HD brows and thickening products. She won awards and was named one of the highest-paid models in the world.
But throughout it all, she was struggling. ‘It didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel like I deserved it,’ she says. ‘I didn’t feel worthy. I was still stuck in this mindset of not being good enough. I was doing the best I could, but I wasn’t really appreciating every moment. Inside, I felt very different to how I looked.’ Still, Delevingne says, she wouldn’t change her fashion ascent now. She speaks warmly of the industry, particularly the friendships she had forged. ‘Me, Jourdan [Dunn] and Karlie [Kloss] were thick as thieves.’ So many people, such as Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, ‘have been so much more than work friends, and have taught me a lot about living’.
She has gradually stepped back from fashion – more than ever, she says, this past year – and instead leaned in to her passion for acting. She is one of the few models to make the career switch successfully. She’s starred in teen dramas (Paper Towns) and blockbusters (Suicide Squad), as well as prestige television, such as the beloved comedy-drama series American Horror Story. She can’t reveal much about it, other than to say the role was written with her in mind (‘One of the most incredible things you can hear as an actor’) and that she finds Murphy hugely inspiring. ‘He can go to such dark depths that other people are scared to, because life goes there,’ she says.
Delevingne has had to find her own way through recovery so far. She started with Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-steps programme and has a sponsor, as well as support from ‘friends who have been down this path before who have been instrumental in guiding me’. But traditional therapy has never worked for her, she says. Instead, she sees Colin Dunsmuir, her yoga teacher since she was 18, three times a week, over FaceTime. Sometimes they talk, or they might do breathing or chanting: ‘Whatever my body needs. He knows me so well. But honestly, feeding myself creatively is probably the best self-care I can do. I feel like art is therapy to me.’
She was at a Jamie xx gig a few days ago and went to Glastonbury, too. She knows that many people recommend paring life back to the basics during the first year of sobriety, but, she says: ‘There’s not a one size fits all. I felt like waiting to have a life again would have been my downfall.’ Her gut is telling her not to put anything on hold, to live life to the fullest. ‘And I believe in that completely, whereas before, I didn’t trust myself. I second-guessed myself constantly. There was a lot of anxiety involved. Now I just feel free of that,’ she says.
One of Delevingne’s recent projects was Planet Sex, an intimate, well-reviewed BBC documentary in which she revealed struggles with shame and internalised homophobia around her own queer identity. Of her identity now, she says she has ‘an awareness and acceptance of the fact that it will always evolve’ and feels ‘comfortable in my skin and in my queerness’. She says she didn’t have icons to look up to when she was young: ‘Not really. Like Billie Jean King, but not until I was older. And Elton and George Michael. And men who pushed the gender boundary like David Bowie and Prince, but not women.’ Representation is important, ‘especially for young people, who feel like they’re alone, to see people who are like them – and to see anyone in the umbrella of the LGBTQIA+ flag. It’s all family.’
She said, in Planet Sex, that she had missed out on being part of a queer community, in part due to becoming so famous so young. That’s not the case anymore. ‘My girlfriend has been really wonderful in introducing me to a lot of things and people,’ she says, of her musician partner Leah Mason, who performs as Minke. (The pair first met 20 years ago, when they were at boarding school, lost touch, then reconnected last year at an Alanis Morissette concert.) Mason has been one of her biggest supporters through sobriety, and one of the reasons ‘2023 has been the best year I’ve had so far’. This year, ‘being with my girlfriend, in this relationship, there are just so many things that came at once that have made me so happy and comfortable with who I am.’ The pair went to LA Pride together: Mason did a drum solo with a pair of dildos. ‘It was fan-tas-tic,’ she says, grinning, enunciating every syllable.
Delevingne is a huge RuPaul’s Drag Race fan; she can’t understand why anyone would object to drag, as the right wing increasingly do, particularly in the United States. She makes an insightful comparison between drag and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thoughts on bodybuilding – she recently watched the Netflix documentary in which he describes being a shy kid who used his muscles to create a new, confident stage persona. ‘He became this different person. Comfortable and free. I am like, “Yes, Arnie, you’re doing drag!” That’s literally what drag is!’ Queer joy is important, she says: ‘Now more than ever, in England and in the US. It’s a scary time for queer people. But the more that we’re met with fear, the more joy we have to bring. Because no one can take that joy away, no matter what. We’re not going anywhere.’
The future looks great, she says: she has a to-do list. Delevingne has always wanted babies: ‘I’ve got my eggs to freeze. Stuff to figure out.’ After that, eventually, she will get some of her tattoos removed, part of what she hopes will be ‘a fresh start’. And there is work, of course. She is signed on for a Patricia Highsmith biopic, focusing on a love triangle between Highsmith (Shailene Woodley), Delevingne and Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant. ‘The script is incredible,’ she says. She is also recording music in the studio but it’s, ‘just for me. There is no plan.’ She is trying to live without expectations. ‘It’s not easy. Like anything, it’s a practice. I’m just taking it day by day. The projects I’m doing are things I really care about.’
One big thing has changed, though: she has now found boundaries. ‘I don’t feel like I learned what [one] was until I got older,’ she says. She demonstrates that, in the lobby bar, with those sweet, awestruck men, who linger at the table and eventually try to cajole her into accompanying them to a James Blake gig. She charmingly swerves them. ‘Sorry. I do have to do an interview now. I’d love to give you more feedback [when I’m done],’ she says with a smile. They go back to their table. And when our interview is over, she hugs me and disappears into her car, leaving quickly so they don’t notice and no egos are crushed. She’s heading to her apartment to spend time with her girlfriend. Everybody has wanted a piece of Cara for over a decade; now she’s learning what to keep for herself.
ELLE's September issue will be available to buy on newsstands from July 27, 2023.
