A new Vogue article, in which model Cara Delevingne opens up about
her sexuality, has angered the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.
In
the revealing interview, Delevingne talks about her mother's battle
with heroin, her own struggles with depression and her ambivalence about
modelling.
She also talks about finding happiness in her new
relationship with singer Annie Clark, better known by her stage name,
St. Vincent.
"I think that being in love with my girlfriend is
a big part of why I'm feeling so happy with who I am these days. And
for those words to come out of my mouth is actually a miracle," the
22-year-old says.
The It-Girl model who has also been linked to
actor Michelle Rodriguez also says she struggled to come to terms with
her sexuality.
"It took me a long time to accept the idea,
until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognised that I had
to accept it," she explains. "But I have erotic dreams only about men. I
had one two nights ago where I went up to a guy in the back of a VW
minivan, with a bunch of his friends around him, and pretty much jumped
him."
At this point in the feature, writer Rob Haskell notes:
"Her parents seem to think girls are just a phase for Cara, and they may
be correct".
He then quotes Delevingne again: "Women are what
completely inspire me and they have also been my downfall. I have only
been hurt by women, my mother first of all.
"The thing is," she
continues, "if I ever found a guy I could fall in love with, I'd want
to marry him and have his children. And that scares me to death because I
think I'm a whole bunch of crazy, and I always worry that a guy will
walk away once he really, truly knows me."
Haskell's interpretation that Delevingne's love of women might be a "phase" has upset people.
It prompted LGBT supporter Julie Rodriguez to start a petition, Tell Vogue Magazine: Being LGBT Isn't a "Phase"!
"Instead
of the praising Cara for her honesty and holding her up as a role model
for the LGBT community, the author of the piece, Rob Haskell, wrote
this: 'Her parents seem to think girls are just a phase for Cara, and
they may be correct'," Rodriguez explains.
UPDATED: After a now infamously awkward interview in which TV anchors accused “Paper Towns” star Cara Delevingne of being “in a mood,” the author of the book has stepped in to defend the model-actress.
Green wrote an essay in Medium
on Thursday sticking up for Delevingne, and seemed to especially take
issue with the fact that one of the anchors asked Delevingne if she had
read the book upon which her movie is based. He harked back to being on
the press tour with Delevingne and the rest of the movie’s stars, saying
the question often came up during interviews.
“Cara has read the book (multiple times), but the question is
annoying — not least because her male co-star, Nat Wolff, was almost
always asked when he’d read the book, while Cara was almost always asked if she’d read it,” Green wrote.
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On a broader scale, the author took a look at the press tour cycle in
general, after now having two big-time runs under his belt, with his
first adaptation, “The Fault in Our Stars,” having come out last year.
“The whole process of commodifying personhood to sell movie tickets
is inherently dehumanizing,” he went on. “The TV people want some part
of you, and in exchange for it, they will put the name of your movie on
TV. But in that process, you do lose something of your self.”
Green said he “just sort of gave up” on junkets, sticking to the
script when answering questions. Delevingne, however, took no such
route, he said.
“Cara, however, refuses to stick to the script,” Green wrote. “She
refuses to indulge lazy questions and refuses to turn herself into an
automaton to get through long days of junketry. I don’t find that
behavior entitled or haughty. I find it admirable. Cara Delevingne
doesn’t exist to feed your narrative or your news feed — and that’s
precisely why she’s so f–king interesting.”
Delevingne tweeted a screenshot of an excerpt from Green’s essay on
Thursday, along with the caption “Whoever said this! Thank you so much!”
Green let her know that he was the author of the kind words, to which
she responded “thank you so much john!! I just read the article and it
made me want to cry! You are so special!! I am so happy I know you x.”
“I am soooooo lucky and anyone who thinks I am unappreciative or
ungrateful clearly doesn’t know me,” Delevingne later wrote on Twitter.
“I work really really hard and love what I do, I don’t feel like I need
to apologize for being human.”
Delevingne previously replied to the interview and the attention that came with it, tweeting on Wednesday that “Some people just don’t understand sarcasm or the British sense of humour.”
by Rob Haskell|photographed by Patrick Demarchelier
Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, Vogue, July 2015
With a host of movie roles on the horizon, Cara Delevingne is
living the life she always wanted and is ready to be unfiltered and
unguarded as never before.
“Trust me,” Cara Delevingne
says, once we’ve settled into a Toronto bar so dark, so thronged, that
even this instantly recognizable young person dissolves into the
shifting masses. “I can find fun anywhere.”
I do trust her. Grinning and conspiratorial, all kinetic limbs and
generous laughter, possessed of a demeanor that suggests that she has
both seen it all and seen nothing at all, she slips so readily into
familiarity that it’s hard to imagine we’ve never met before. She’d like
to know everything about me, which is hardly the point; but it’s the
point with Cara. “I love figuring out a stranger, sitting down and
learning about their loves and struggles and everything,” she says.
“People are my jam.”
Taylor Swift, Pharrell, Kendall Jenner, and more celebrate Cara Delevingne’s first solo Vogue cover:
She’s here shooting DC’s secrecy-shrouded Suicide Squad, due next summer, and Rihanna
and her other famous besties are nowhere to be found. But that’s OK,
because the leash is tight. “I’m not allowed to drink. I’m not allowed
good food,” she says. “After turning 20 and eating McDonald’s all the
time and drinking too much, it started to show on my stomach and on my
face. But I’m playing a homicidal witch, so I need to look ripped.” I
ask her if her body has become her temple, and she laughs. “I always
chuckle at that saying. I say my body is a roller coaster. Enjoy the
ride.”
“But can you believe that?” she goes on. “That I have to exercise
restraint after I’ve succeeded in a business where for years I had no
restraint, where the whole point was excess?” Cara wants to make one
thing very clear tonight: Modeling was an amuse-bouche, an hors
d’oeuvre, never the main dish. Acting is and always was the thing: “The
thrill of acting is making a character real. Modeling is the opposite of
real. It’s being fake in front of the camera.”
This month she appears in her first leading role, as the brooding and beautiful enigma at the center of Paper Towns, adapted from John Green’s novel of the same name. If teenage audiences respond to it as they did the film version of Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Cara will, she tells me in her characteristic marriage of plummy and potty-mouthed, “freak the fuck out.”
The food sent down from David Chang’s
restaurant upstairs is so spicy that for intervals we can do little
more than smile at each other and pant happily. Cara is wearing the
skinniest suit imaginable, from the Kooples, and a pair of Chanel
trainers. She tugs a cube of meat off a skewer with her teeth, offering
the wink-and-grin-and-head-tilt that her thirteen million Instagram followers (that’s almost twice as many as Lady Gaga has) would recognize instantly—a selfie counterpoint to the iterative steely glamour of her fashion billboards. As Paper Towns’s
director, Jake Schreier, tells me later, “What picture can the
paparazzi get that Cara hasn’t already gotten? That’s what I call taking
control of your image.”
We are, Cara says, about as far as she ever gets from the bubble—a
word that becomes our shared shorthand for that inexorable whirl of
dinners and défilés, fittings and sittings that constitute a career in modeling. True, she has a few active-duty leaves from the Suicide Squad set in the coming weeks—New York for a Chanel fashion show, Los Angeles for a big Burberry bash—but
to hear Cara talk about the bubble, you’d think she’d already left it
behind. “I’m not sure I understand what fashion is anymore,” she says.
“I admit I was terrified to leave. I mean, the bubble gives you a kind
of dysfunctional family. When you’re in it, you get it. And the second
you’re out of it, you’re like, What the hell just happened?”
Acting has traditionally proved hostile terrain for models, and few
cover girls have made successful crossings. But Cara, according to her
colleagues in both fashion and film, appears to possess gifts that her
thwarted predecessors lacked. For starters, she has become the
preeminent model of her era through the brazen display of personality,
that thing most models are now richly paid to hide. Far from a rare
orchid that wilts in the breath of more noxious air, Cara, simmering
with life on the runway, boils over with life off it. She has been
called the next Kate Moss,
but the similarities begin and end at their shortish stature (for their
profession, that is: both are five-eight), English background, and
penchant for late nights. Whereas Kate has retained an essential
unknowability, Cara seems always to be declaring, “This is the real me!”
I feel this desire to throw away the story I’ve been telling for years. Cheers—to a new story!
The designer Erdem Moralioglu
calls this her “characterful-ness,” a sort of elfin energy that
animates her beauty. “In 20 years,” he says, “we may look back at this
era and think of Cara the same way we look back at the sixties and think
of Jean Shrimpton.” Karl Lagerfeld,
the designer with whom she has become most closely identified,
acknowledged her leavening effect on his industry when he called her
“the Charlie Chaplin of the fashion world.” (It was that most precious
of Lagerfeld confections: a compliment.)
Though DC wants her fit as a fiddle, Cara decides that a glass of red
wine can’t hurt. Perhaps it will ease the passage of all that veritas
she seems intent on spilling. “I feel this desire to throw away the
story I’ve been telling for years,” she says, raising her glass.
“Cheers—to a new story!”
The tale begins in the Belgravia neighborhood of London, in whose
rows of white stucco houses aristocratic families live in the comforting
proximity of families they have known for generations. Cara’s father,
Charles Delevingne, is a property developer, and though he did not grow
up rich, his looks and charm got him invited everywhere. Her mother,
Pandora, a London society beauty in her day, is the daughter of the late
Sir Jocelyn Stevens, a publishing magnate, and Jane Sheffield,
lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and a charter member of the
princess’s Mustique set in the 1960s.
“I grew up in the upper class, for sure,” says Cara, whose older sister Poppy,
29, is also a model, while Chloe, 30, a scientist by training, has
moved to the country to raise her children. “My family was kind of about
that whole parties–and–horse racing thing. I can understand it’s fun
for some. I never enjoyed it.” But it was Pandora’s relapsing heroin
addiction that may have been the defining fact of Cara’s childhood. “It
shapes the childhood of every kid whose parent has an addiction,” she
believes. “You grow up too quickly because you’re parenting your
parents. My mother’s an amazingly strong person with a huge heart, and I
adore her. But it’s not something you get better from, I don’t think. I
know there are people who have stopped and are fine now, but not in my
circumstance. She’s still struggling.” (Pandora is currently working on a
memoir—about her battle with addiction and the eighties London scene
that formed its backdrop—which Cara says she has mixed feelings about.)
Now 22, Cara was a brooding little girl whose sisters excelled in
school. She recalls spending an inordinate amount of time in the offices
of mental health professionals whom, she admits, she tended to “screw
with,” saying the same things again and again, trying to get them so
frustrated they’d fire her as a patient. At nine, she was told she had
the reading ability of a sixteen-year-old. (Later, at sixteen, she was
told she had the reading ability of a nine-year-old.) She suffered from
dyspraxia, a problem with coordinating her thoughts and movements.
Writing was always hard, exams a nightmare. After her sixth-form year,
the Delevingnes sent her to Bedales, a posh but arty boarding school.
“Totally hippie-dippy,” she says. “If you had a Chanel bag there, you’d
be bullied.”
She immersed herself in drama and music. (Her parents had started her
on drum lessons at age ten to help dissipate some of her inexhaustible
energy.) But at fifteen, she fell into an emotional morass.
“This is
something I haven’t been open about, but it’s a huge part of who I am,”
she says. “All of a sudden I was hit with a massive wave of depression
and anxiety and self-hatred, where the feelings were so painful that I
would slam my head against a tree to try to knock myself out. I never
cut, but I’d scratch myself to the point of bleeding. I just wanted to
dematerialize and have someone sweep me away.”
She was placed on a cocktail of psychotropics—“stronger stuff than
Prozac” is all she recalls. “I smoked a lot of pot as a teenager, but I
was completely mental with or without drugs.” She saw an armada of
therapists, none especially helpful. “I thought that if I wanted to act,
I’d need to finish school, but I got so I couldn’t wake up in the
morning. The worst thing was that I knew I was a lucky girl, and the
fact that you would rather be dead . . . you just feel so guilty for
those feelings, and it’s this vicious circle. Like, how dare I feel that
way? So you just attack yourself some more.”
She dropped out, promising her parents she would find a job. Her
sister Poppy was already modeling, and Cara had been noticed by an
agency executive whose daughter was a schoolmate. But modeling was a
rough ride at first. She worked for a year before booking a paying job
and paraded through two seasons of castings before landing her first
runway show. “The first time I walked into Burberry,” she recalls, “the
woman just said, ‘Turn around, go away.’ And all the test shoots with
the pervy men.
Never trust a straight photographer at a test shoot.”
Then, finally, she met Burberry’s Christopher Bailey, who cast her in the company’s spring 2011 campaign. At eighteen, she was a late bloomer relative to her model friends Karlie Kloss and Jourdan Dunn, who made their runway debuts in their mid-teens.
“I remember feeling so jealous when she and Jourdan first met,” Kloss
remembers. “Cara can create that kind of jealousy because she can make
anyone fall in love with her. But it’s misunderstanding her to think
she’s just the life of the party. Yes, she’s the life of the party. But
she’s extremely serious about her work. And here’s the thing: She is
truly herself while being in the public eye—not easy to do.”
Her career hurtled out of the station. The lush, expressive
caterpillars above her eyes shook the bushy brow awake from a
three-decade hibernation, and on the runway, her half-upturned mouth,
which seemed to suggest a mind dancing with naughty ideas, looked
delicious within a sea of glazed, blank-looking beauties.
“The thing about Cara is that she’s more than just a model—she stands for something in her generation’s eyes,” says Stella McCartney,
who first met her at the Paris shows a few years ago. “She has a
fearlessness about projecting what she stands for, which is so rare. In a
certain sense she’s brought back some of that energy you saw in the supermodel era, with Linda and Naomi.
In our industry, people can be rather forced, not genuinely themselves.
Cara would never pretend to be someone she’s not, and she’s not living
her life for other people’s approval.”
Being in love with my girlfriend is a big part of why I’m feeling so happy with who I am these days
Cara cataloged her every move on social media, but outside Instagram,
the reins were in other hands. “My agents told me what to do, and I did
it,” Cara says of those early days. “When I got in trouble, they told
me off. It was a machine that I wasn’t controlling.” She was passing out
on shoots, and she developed severe psoriasis. “It was like the
disgusting way I felt inside was transposing itself on my skin. Somebody
should have said stop.” In fact it was Kate Moss and Vogue’s Tonne Goodman
who suggested that she yank the emergency brake. She spent a week in
the Los Angeles sun writing poetry and music, and the psoriasis
disappeared.
But back in New York, she continued to distract herself by partying.
“I had to be doing things with people at all times,” she explains. “The
life of the party is an easy part for me to play. It rots your insides,
though.”
Cara doesn’t list every powder that passed under her nose during
those days, but I doubt that drugs were ever much more than the
occupational hazard of a girl with access, big appetites, and an
escapist streak. “Honestly, I don’t think I did anything different from
other people my age,” she says. “But I definitely have that addict gene.
For me it comes out in an addiction to work. I’d probably have done
more drugs back then if I hadn’t been working like mad.”
Depression, Cara says, runs in and out of her life, as does a
tendency toward the self-destructive. “It’s like, if anything is good
for too long, I prefer to ruin it.” At a low point, alone in a New York
apartment, she came close to attempting suicide. She was due to leave on
vacation the next day, in the grip of an unshakable insomnia. “Full-on
bubble. I was packing my bags, and suddenly I just wanted to end it. I
had a way, and it was right there in front of me. And I was like, I need
to decide whether I love myself as much as I love the idea of death.”
And then a song started playing on her laptop, Outkast’s
“SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” which had been played at the funeral of a
friend who had recently died of a heroin overdose. “It felt like a
warning from him. And it made me so furious with myself.”
The story goes a long way toward explaining Cara’s mixed feelings
about fashion, a world that has exalted her but chewed her up a bit in
the process. She thinks acting and music, always the long-term plan,
saved her. At this point her ambition to play music, she says, “is just a
flower growing through concrete.” She doesn’t dream of being an
overnight pop star. “Singing, writing songs, is kind of my biggest fear,
but it’s the thing I feel I need to conquer.” This spring I watched as she joined Pharrell Williams onstage in New York to perform a duet
he wrote for them for a short fashion film made by Lagerfeld. Cara
sings with a restrained rasp, though her heroes are more unleashed:
Prince and Al Green.
“I first met Cara at the Met ball
two years ago,” Pharrell recalls, “and I thought, Here’s a person with
this unique energy. But in working with her, what amazed me was how
prepared she was, how carefully she studied. Cara overshows up.”
“She’s more together now, more grounded,” says Sienna Miller,
who has known Cara for most of a decade. “But even as a young teenager
she was this ebullient force, this magnetic presence. I’m not sure it’s
ever happened before that someone could move so seamlessly through
different fields and achieve in them all. I kind of always thought you
had to choose. But then most people don’t have Cara’s talent.”
Though she stood around looking lovely in 2012’s Anna Karenina, the next couple of years herald her undeniable cinematic arrival. Cara is due to appear in no fewer than seven films: The Face of an Angel, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the Amanda Knox story (in which she does not play Amanda Knox); Kids in Love, a coming-of-age story set in London; Tulip Fever, a period drama; London Fields, based on the Martin Amis novel; Pan, an origin story about Peter Pan and Captain Hook; Valerian, from the director Luc Besson; and the one that may turn her into a movie star, Paper Towns.
The film tells the story of a pair of childhood friends living in the
suburbs of Orlando, Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara) and Quentin “Q”
Jacobsen (Nat Wolff, who played the lead character’s blind best friend
in The Fault in Our Stars). Their paths diverged years earlier,
when Margo ascended to queen of her high school’s popular crowd, but
one night toward the end of their senior year, Margo climbs in through
Q’s window and recruits him as her accomplice in a meticulously planned
act of revenge—thrilling, dangerous, and romantic. The next day, she
disappears, fueling the mystery at the film’s core. “People tell me I’m
just like Margo,” Cara says. “But as a seventeen-year-old I was nothing
like her, so mischievous, so sure of herself. Her boyfriend cheats on
her, and she screws up his little life. Maybe I’m more like her now.”
Schreier, who previously directed the 2012 sci-fi film Robot & Frank,
believes the character of Margo resonated with Cara instantly. “I had
her improvise with Nat, who had already been cast, and it was gripping,”
he remembers. “She won the part in the room that day.” Margo may bring
to mind the sullen glamour of Winona Ryder’s character in Heathers, or the bewitched Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks;
she is the reluctant goddess, a girl whose mythos drives her friends to
set out in pursuit of her, only to learn at the end that the real Margo
is someone quite different from the girl they’d imagined. Paper Towns
is about how simultaneously oppressive and irresistible it can be to be
the object of collective fantasy and projection. It’s hard to imagine
anyone understanding that better than Cara Delevingne.
“Somehow I was the only person on the face of the Earth who had never
heard of Cara,” recalls Wolff, her costar. “Then she walked in and I
said, ‘Hey, you’re on a billboard right outside my apartment.’ Cara has
this rock-star quality, but there’s also a fragility to her. That’s what
makes the best actors—they’re complicated.” When the camera wasn’t
rolling, Cara cavorted in her generous fashion. One evening, she whisked
a group of her castmates to a hotel suite at a water park. On another
occasion, she recruited 30 extras to film a spontaneous response to the
rapper A$AP Ferg’s viral video “Dope Walk” in between setups.
“Being on set was like getting to relive school again, but happy,”
Cara says. “Trying to be an adult and be mature for so long, I’d kind of
forgotten how young I was.” Though she first took the stage in a
preschool play, she doesn’t pretend to much in the way of technique.
“I’m no Method actor. I’ve tried staying in character, and it’s just
exhausting. But after playing Margo, I broke up with my boyfriend in a
totally Margo way. I wrote him a letter and left. That wasn’t me, it was
Margo.”
Those who have been gathering the crumbs on Cara’s romantic trail may
be confused about whether it’s men or women who excite her. She conveys
a Millennial’s ennui at the expectation that she ought to settle upon a
sexual orientation, and her interests—video games, yes; manicures,
no—might register as gender-defiant in the realm of dresses and heels.
(“I’m a bro-ey chick,” says Cara.) As this story went to press, she was
seriously involved with the singer Annie Clark, better known by her
stage name, St. Vincent. “I think that being in love with my girlfriend
is a big part of why I’m feeling so happy with who I am these days. And
for those words to come out of my mouth is actually a miracle.”
Cara says she felt confused by her sexuality as a child, and the
possibility of being gay frightened her. “It took me a long time to
accept the idea, until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and
recognized that I had to accept it,” she explains. “But I have erotic
dreams only about men. I had one two nights ago where I went up to a guy
in the back of a VW minivan, with a bunch of his friends around him,
and pretty much jumped him.” Her parents seem to think girls are just a
phase for Cara, and they may be correct. “Women are what completely
inspire me, and they have also been my downfall. I have only been hurt
by women, my mother first of all.
“The thing is,” she continues, “if I ever found a guy I could fall in
love with, I’d want to marry him and have his children. And that scares
me to death because I think I’m a whole bunch of crazy, and I always
worry that a guy will walk away once he really, truly knows me.” When I
suggest to Cara that to trust a man, she might have to revise an old and
stubborn idea of hers—that women are perennially troubled and therefore
only women will accept her—her smile says she concedes the point.
It’s now past midnight. There are no photographers in sight, and
indeed the only person who appears to recognize Cara in the amber light
is the barmaid, who as we leave approaches to tell her she’s dropped
something, then hands her a piece of crumpled paper and quickly
disappears. Cara pulls it open to find a message—food? drink? party?
call me—along with a phone number.
And for the moment, she appears to be considering something other
than beating her retreat. “You’ve got balls, babe,” Cara says at the
prospect of another stranger, another puzzle. “Maybe that deserves a
reward.”
Model gives frank interview in which she says that writing and yoga helped her
beat depression when she was at school
Cara DelevingnePhoto: GETTY
By Agency
2:11AM BST 10 Oct 2015
Cara Delevingne has opened up about her prolonged fight with depression, claiming that writing and yoga helped turn her life around.
The model-turned-actress said that she had felt "completely suicidal and alone" and wanted "the world to swallow me up" during her school years.
She said part of her recovery was learning how to say no and "not doing anything for anyone else apart from yourself".
Of her frantic modelling career the 23-year-old said: "I had no concept
of saying no to anyone, ever. In life you should always experience
things but you should say no. It's more about being in control and not
being a puppet.
Cara Delevingne
"Because after a while I just started to get sick and got this horrible thing, psoriasis.
She said she saw herself like an alien while experiencing the skin condition and felt "more disconnected from myself than I think I ever had".
Speaking at the Women in the World conference Delevingne said she reached a turning point and that "I wanted someone to go 'you need to take a break, you need to look after yourself'. No-one did."
"I eventually said no and I eventually took a break. I took the advice of Kate Moss who picked me up off the floor passed out.
"I started writing - writing is something that really saved my life. I
would read what I had written and it would be like someone else was
speaking to me. It was a very strange experience.
"Then after that I found yoga, which was a huge thing for me.
Cara Delevingne
"I was chanting and I got so angry with myself, and I broke through
something and I burst into tears which I hadn't done in years."
Delevingne also shared a poem that she had written a year ago during a bout of depression.
She read out loud: "Who am I, who am I trying to be? Not myself, anyone but myself.
"Empty beyond the point of emptiness, full to the brim of fake confidence.
“In our culture, we are told that if we are beautiful, if we are
skinny, successful, famous, if we fit in, if everyone loves us – then we
will be happy. But that’s not entirely true."
Cara Delevingne
"The show must go on, it will never stop. The show must not go on, but I know it will."
Ending with advice for the audience of young women, Delevingne said:
"My message has always been to love yourself, to embrace your flaws.
"The cracks within us are the beautiful parts that need to have light shone on them."
On a broader scale, the author took a look at the press tour cycle in
general, after now having two big-time runs under his belt, with his
first adaptation, “The Fault in Our Stars,” having come out last year.
Cara Delevingne
Cara Delevingne