“[A] fresh start—new beginnings,” Cara Delevingne said of her focus moving forward in early 2023. At that point, the model had just turned 30 in Formentera (a milestone trip preserved for posterity by several hundred long-lens images of Delevingne’s golden-limbed friends plunging into cobalt waters and wafting around stone fincas in linen separates and Chanel bucket hats) before returning to California, where a less flattering, more worrying set of photos at Van Nuys Airport proved a catalyst for her journey to sobriety through the 12-step program. “Work is extremely important, but work is secondary because my self-work is the most important thing [right now],” she told Chioma Nnadi in Vogue’s April 2023 issue.
A year later, Cara’s officially ready to take on another professional challenge: starring as Sally Bowles in the latest iteration of the Playhouse Theatre’s Cabaret, opposite Olivier-winner Luke Treadaway’s Emcee. First opened in December 2021 with Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne leading the “willkommen, bienvenue” party, Cabaret won seven Oliviers the following spring—a record for any musical revival in London—and has since seen a range of starlets slipping into Sally Bowles’s Bauhaus prints and faux mink coats at the Kit Kat Club, from Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood to Euphoria’s Maude Apatow. The decision to join their ranks represents a homecoming for Cara, who’s been based in LA for years now, and marks her stage debut after years of Hollywood roles, from Paper Towns to Carnival Row.
Delevingne is, of course, best known for her influence on fashion—when she landed her first British Vogue cover in March 2013, even Rihanna felt compelled to praise her “effortless style” in an email to the magazine: “[It’s] tomboy and bratty, like mine. She is so cool!”—but acting has always been her endgame. Before Cara wreaked havoc on Tweezerman’s profit margins with a string of Burberry campaigns in the 2010s—including one alongside Redmayne—she studied theater at both Thomas’s Battersea (made famous by Prince George and Princess Charlotte’s enrollment) and Bedales, a boarding school in Hampshire that counts Daniel Day-Lewis among its graduates. (It’s at the latter that Delevingne first met her now-partner, musician Minke, with the pair reconnecting 12 years later at an Alanis Morissette concert.)
She left school before completing her A-levels, however, starting to audition in earnest at the age of 16. A music career was never far from her mind, either; she plays piano, guitar, and drums and counts both Whitney Houston and Metallica percussionist Lars Ulrich among her teen idols. (Those wondering about the quality of her voice can hear her singing backing vocals on Fiona Apple’s Grammy-nominated 2020 album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters.) Modeling, meanwhile, was something she almost fell into—taking on a job for Bamford with the aim of paying for a gap year in India and Brazil with her friends before Burberry came calling. Tellingly, even when Cara met Christopher Bailey to discuss the campaign that would launch her career, “I told him I really wanted to act and do music,” she confessed to Vogue shortly before her second Model of the Year win at the British Fashion Awards.
Not for nothing did Karl Lagerfeld call her “the Charlie Chaplin of fashion,” and now the rest of the world will finally have a chance to witness her peculiar strain of genius, too. “What good is sitting all alone in your room?” indeed.
Cara Delevingne will be performing in Cabaret from March 11, with tickets available now through the Playhouse Theatre.