Six months ago, Cara Delevingne was photographed by paparazzi outside Los Angeles’ Van Nuys Airport. That time she puzzled fans over her health with strange behavior, she walked nervously, as if unable to control her body movements, and had dark circles around her eyes. The 30-year-old model is giving fans an update saying that she’s sober after checking herself into rehab last year.
In the cover story of Vogue for April, published on March 8, the model said, “I hadn’t slept. I was not okay. It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, Okay, I don’t look well. You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”
The same photos prompted her friends to offer their support.
She recalled during an interview at her home in L.A., “From September, I just needed support. I needed to start reaching out. And my old friends I’ve known since I was 13, they all came over and we started crying. They looked at me and said, ‘You deserve a chance to have joy.'”
The Carnival Row actress realized she was ready to change. She explained, “I’ve had interventions of a sort, but I wasn’t ready. That’s the problem. If you’re not face-first on the floor and ready to get up again, you won’t. At that point. I really was.”
According to Vogue, the model went to rehab for therapeutic support and signed up for a 12-step program.
She shared, “Before I was always into the quick fix of healing, going to a weeklong retreat or to a course for trauma, say, and that helped for a minute, but it didn’t ever really get to the nitty-gritty, the deeper stuff. This time I realized that 12-step treatment was the best thing, and it was about not being ashamed of that. The community made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12-step.”
Delevingne also talked about her experience with alcohol from the age of 7 and how she witnessed her mom, Pandora, struggled with addiction, too.
According to her, she also experienced “existential crisis” during the pandemic, following her split with Ashley Benson and not being able to work. After the pandemic, she returned to partying whenever she had free time. But everything changed when she saw the photos at the airport.
At four months sober, she’s committed to her sobriety journey, saying, “This process obviously has its ups and downs, but I’ve started realizing so much. People want my story to be this after-school special where I just say, ‘Oh look, I was an addict, and now I’m sober and that’s it.’ And it’s not as simple as that. It doesn’t happen overnight….Of course I want things to be instant—I think this generation especially, we want things to happen quickly—but I’ve had to dig deeper.”
