Cara Delevingne sparked widespread concern after paparazzi pictures taken at a private LA airport last September showed the model and actress looking disheveled and acting erratically after returning from Burning Man. Now, in a revealing cover interview with Vogue, the 30-year-old said she was grateful for these pictures because they sent her down the path to rehab and sobriety.
“I hadn’t slept. I wasn’t well,” she told Vogue writer Chioma Nnadi. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at one point I was like, ‘OK, I don’t look good. You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”
For the interview, which was conducted in late January, Delevingne admitted she was four months sober after a stint in rehab late last year. “I had some kind of intervention, but I wasn’t ready yet. That’s the problem. Unless you’re lying face down on the ground and ready to get back up, you won’t,” she said, adding that she concluded she needed help. “I hadn’t seen a therapist in three years. I just pushed everyone away, which made me realize how badly I was in a bad place. I always thought that work had to be done when times were bad, but actually work had to be done when times were good. The work must be carried out consistently. It’s never repaired or fully healed, but I’m OK with it, and that’s the difference.”
The cover story – with styling by Jorden Bickham and photos by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz – describes Delevingne’s family life with a special focus on her mother Pandora, who also suffered from substance abuse problems. “I haven’t really put myself in their shoes for a long time. I just needed someone to be angry with, and I was angry with her, but it wasn’t her fault. … The way this addiction took my mother off of me was brutal, and it was brutal for her too.”
She started drinking and partying as a teenager and reveals that her first experience of alcohol abuse was at a family wedding at the age of 7. “I woke up hungover in my bedroom at my grandma’s house in a bridesmaid’s dress. I had been running around nailing champagne glasses.”
Her troubles as a teenager included debilitating insomnia; dyspraxia, a disorder affecting movement and coordination; a nervous breakdown; and “unintentional self-harm,” she noted. “As a teenager, everything just fell apart. That’s when I started drinking and partying too. There was this need to escape and change my reality as I was faced with huge questions: What am I doing here? Who am I trying to be?”
Speaking of her wild days at Burning Man, Delevingne said, “I feel invincible when I’m on drugs. In those moments I put myself in danger because I don’t care about my life.” There were times when she was covered in bruises that she couldn’t explain. “I would climb and jump off of stuff… It felt wild. It’s a scary thing for the people around you who love you.”
In terms of those who love Delevingne, the article quotes several of her close friends, including Margot Robbie and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and she said she is close to her Only Murders in the Building co-star Selena Gomez. “We all have moments in our lives that we would rather not have photographed and shared with everyone. She has retained her honesty and vulnerability and is open-hearted about her life and experiences – what more could you ask for from a person living their life in a fishbowl?” offered Waller-Brücke. “There is no one like her in the world. She was a rock solid friend to me.”
Robbie, who became close to Delevingne on the set of Suicide Squad, says, “We spent most of our 20’s together and were at each other’s side when we got into our 30’s. I was literally with her the day I turned 30 and vice versa. I think it will always be like this – 40’s, 50’s, 60’s. God knows what we’re going to do on our 70th birthday, but just thinking about it makes me laugh.”
Delevingne credits a 12-step program for her recovery and healthy living that includes yoga, meditation, extra exercise, three meals a day, and a therapy plan that also includes psychodrama. She also says that “self-work” is the most important thing in her life today, while her career is “secondary”. Still, she’s been busy on that front with a new season of Prime Video’s Carnival Row and the Hulu docuseries Planet Sex. Her other credits include Paper Towns, Pan, Tulip Fever, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Her Smell, Life in a Year and London Fields.
“Before, I was always focused on quick healing, like going to a week-long retreat or a trauma course, and that helped for a minute, but it never really got down to the basics, the deeper things. This time I realized the 12 step treatment was the best and it was all about not being ashamed of it. The community has made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12 steps,” she said. “Of course, this process has its ups and downs, but I’ve started to see so much. People want my story to be that after-school special where I’m just like, ‘Oh look, I was addicted and now I’m sober and that’s it.’ And it’s not that simple. It doesn’t happen overnight… Of course I want things to happen immediately – I think this generation especially wants things to happen quickly – but I had to dig deeper.”