Cara de la screen: how Cara Delevingne is swapping supermodel status for big screen stardom

The supermodel is making the ultimate career pivot from catwalk queen to movie star. As the first of her seven new films is released, Phoebe Luckhurst says Ms Delevingne may have found her groove

Screen test: Cara with Gala Gordon in a scene from Kids in Love (Picture: Ealing Studios)

Phoebe Luckhurst @phoebeluckhurst

25 March 2015

Four years ago, when she appeared in her first Burberry campaign, it would have been impossible to be as famous as Cara Delevingne. Nowadays, her pursuit by a ravenous press and public, and your smartphone, means constant information about the 23-year-old supermodel is literally in your pocket. Her playful eagerness to share her life on social media facilitates the wall-to-wall coverage. Cara is meant to be Kate Moss’s heir apparent but Moss never complains and never explains, while Cara does both — and shares the details with her 2.4 million Twitter followers and 10.3 million on Instagram. While Moss and her generation felt separate, Cara and her pals feel like your extended friendship group.

She’s now the world’s most famous model, and is making big bucks: in accounts filed by her company Cara & Co in November 2014, it was revealed that she earned £6,500 per day in 2013, took £2.4 million in earnings that year, and had £1.1 million in her account. She was owed £1.3 million in modelling jobs finished up to January 2014.

But Cara wants to be an actress. This season she walked only for Chanel — as a favour to Karl Lagerfeld — but is appearing in seven films over the next year: Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of An Angel (released on Friday), John Green’s Paper Towns, Harvey Weinstein’s Tulip Fever, low-budget indie flick Kids in Love, comic-book adaptation Suicide Squad, fantasty film Pan, by Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright, co-starring Hugh Jackman and Amanda Seyfried, and London Fields, alongside Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. It’s an impressive roster. Most established actors don’t get that many scripts in a year, let alone ones of that calibre.

“To be honest, I didn’t know who Cara was before I met her,” Winterbottom says. “I met her in the morning and she had travelled overnight from the Caribbean or something, and she was so full of energy and fun. I thought she would be perfect. When you watch the film it looks like she is being herself and acting spontaneously.”

Cara on screen - in pictures

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The Face of An Angel is inspired by the Amanda Knox trial. Cara plays Melanie, a student on her year abroad in a small Italian town. The film is an examination of the press’s fascination with a pretty young face — with the clear exception that it has a murder trial at its heart — it could be a nightmare rendering of Cara’s own story.

Evening Standard’s film critic, David Sexton, writes that Cara brings “puckish charm” to Melanie. Another paper commented that Delevingne’s was a “striking debut performance”. Reviewing for The Independent, critic Kaleem Aftab says: “She’s convincing as a student wanting to have fun, having a romantic view of life and having the savvy and local know-how to point Thomas in the direction of the local drug dealer.”

Winterbottom, whose films have been nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes on three occasions, adds: “She was working with two of Europe’s top actors and she held her own. I think she’s incredibly keen to be an actor. She’s very bright and interested in all aspects of film-making. She was fun and easy to work with. The great thing about Cara is that she is exactly how you would imagine she would be.”

Her fans are obsessive — “She was constantly followed around by 50 teenage fans everywhere we went,” says Winterbottom — and many will want to continue to see her in ad campaigns and on the catwalk. Predictably there are rumours but she has no (confirmed) plans to quit modelling. “I don’t think we should be put in boxes,” she told Vogue (she is this month’s cover star, alongside mates Georgia May Jagger and Suki Waterhouse). “I hate that: being an ‘actress slash model’. I think all of us [she, Jagger and Waterhouse] aspire to do a lot of different things.”

She might not be able to fit it all in. Last year she fronted campaigns for Topshop, DKNY, Fendi, Mulberry, Balmain, Pepe Jeans and Burberry, and took covers on British and American Vogues, Miss Vogue UK and LOVE magazine; she Instagrammed each new image with grateful, effusive captions. But as the year drew to a close, backstage shots transitioned from fashion shoots to film sets.

Licing in a fairytale: Cara Delevingne plays a mermaid in Pan, due out in July (Picture: Warner Bros. Pictures)

Her fans are on board: a picture of the Paper Towns poster got almost 600,000 likes and the film poster for The Face of an Angel 250,000. And while her best pals still include fellow models such as Jourdan Dunn, Karlie Kloss and Kendall Jenner, she was spotted in LA in the run-up to the Oscars hobnobbing with the Hollywood crowd at the Mulberry Bafta tea party. She also found time to catch up with Burberry alumnus Eddie Redmayne, who went on to win Best Actor for his portrayal of scientist Stephen Hawking.

In fact, despite her relatively brief CV, she’s already an award-winning actress: Cara won Breakthrough Actress at this year’s ELLE Style Awards. It may seem premature but if you’ve seen Cara on screen, you’ll know she can act.

She’s natural on camera and steals each scene, even if she’s just smoking a joint in the background. You can’t take your eyes of her. British actors — especially those with Cara’s well spoken vowels — tend to trip over American accents: Cara’s in the Paper Towns trailer is passably good. After casting Cara, John Green tweeted: “Cara Delevingne’s audition blew everyone away (including me!) and she understands Margo profoundly. I am so excited!” The film is likely to be commercially successful: Green also write tweenage tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars, which took more than £200 million at the box office last year. Cara’s name on the billing means this one may make more.

The girl who’s now juggling everything — and so busy that American Vogue alleges she falls asleep in interviews, which Cara denies — didn’t used to think about where things were headed. “I thought I was going to be the one stuck on a gap year for two years, lost in India,” Cara told Time Out this week. “I never thought about the future. I’ve only started thinking about it in the last six months, purely because I’m doing a film until September and then another one next year. All I knew was that I wanted to act and I wanted to do music.”

At school — “bohemian” Hampshire boarding school Bedales — she spent a lot of time hanging out in music studios and acting in plays. She left school following her GCSEs after she was scouted by the founder of model agency Storm, Sarah Doukas, whose daughter was also at Bedales. Doukas was the agent who spotted Kate Moss at JFK airport when she was 14 — whatever Cara’s detractors say, hers is the name of the decade, as Moss’s was of the Nineties.

“Working with her was great and I think she is great in the film,” Winterbottom says. “I’m sure she is going to be a big success.”

GIRL ON FILM — CARA D’S FILM CV

The first one

Released on Friday, The Face of an Angel co-stars Cara as carefree exchange student Melanie alongside Daniel Bruhl and Kate Beckinsale.

The big-budget blockbuster

Film adaptation of John Green’s Paper Towns — he wrote last summer’s hit The Fault in Our Stars. Cara plays a runaway called Margo. Released August.

The Weinstein one

Delevingne is slated to play Henrietta in the forthcoming Weinstein production of Tulip Fever. Tom Stoppard has written the screenplay.

The indie one

Cara spent last summer with a gaggle of photogenic cohorts including fellow-up-and-comers Gala Gordon and Will Poulter for Kids in Love. Release expected this year.

The comic book

Cara is currently filming Suicide Squad with Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Jared Leto. She plays Enchantress in the DC comic adaptation.

The fantasy flick

Delevingne plays a mermaid in Pan, the backstory of Peter Pan and Captain Hook. Directed by Joe Wright, it is expected in July.

The gritty Brit drama

An adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields. Cara plays Kath Talent, wife of criminal Keith, played by Jim Sturgess. Also expected this year.

@phoebeluckhurst

Cara de la screen: how Cara Delevingne is swapping supermodel status for big screen stardom

Cara on screen - in pictures

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