Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Her Childhood, Love Life, and Why Modeling Just Isn’t Enough

 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.

 She’s here shooting DC’s secrecy-shrouded Suicide Squad, due next summer, andRihanna 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.”