Cara Delevingne is four months sober after seeking treatment for addiction last year.
The British model and actress opened up about her personal life overhaul in Vogue’s April cover story. The Suicide Squad star, who’s now in a 12-step recovery program amid abuse of substances and alcohol, admitted, “I was not OK” last year, and said those paparazzi photos of her looking disheveled, sans shoes at the Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles in September, were a wakeup call she’s “grateful” for.
“The way that I was living was not sustainable,” Delevingne told the outlet.
Delevingne had long had a reputation for partying, but last summer she took things to the max. A three-week vacation in Ibiza culminated with her throwing herself an elaborate Alice in Wonderland-themed 30th birthday party in August. That was followed by traveling to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for Burning Man.
“I decided I was going to party as hard as I could because this was the end,” she said, telling herself that at 30 — which she turned on Aug. 12 — she was going to scale back on consumption. “I decided … I’m going to go crazy, in a fun way.
But what was fun to her worried her inner circle. “There’s an element of feeling invincible when I’m on drugs,” she said, not mentioning specifically which substances she was using. “I put myself in danger in those moments because I don’t care about my life. I would climb anything and jump off stuff,” she said, noting she’d be covered in bruises. “It felt feral. It’s a scary thing to the people around you who love you.”
The photos of her — hair wild while wearing a Britney Spears T-shirt, track suit and socks and acting erratically — were published in early September and quickly went viral amid concerns over her well-being.
“I hadn’t slept. I was not OK,” she admitted. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, OK, 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.”
She said, “All I knew is that if I was continuing to go down the road I was, either I’d end up dead or doing something really, really stupid. That was scary.”
Delevingne “had interventions of a sort” before but “wasn’t ready,” she said. However, by the fall, “I really was.” She checked herself into rehab late last year to face her demons, including struggles with “self-hatred,” and has since committed to a 12-step program.
“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,” said Delevingne, who grew up with a mom who suffers from mental illness and addiction. “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.”
She said getting therapy, which she hadn’t had in three years prior to going to treatment, was also key, specifically psychodrama, during which patients act out events from their past. “I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually the work needs to be done when they’re good,” she said. “The work needs to be done consistently. It’s never going to be fixed or fully healed but I’m OK with that, and that’s the difference.”
Delevingne said she’s been prioritizing her health by getting outside, working out, meditating and doing yoga, among other forms of self-care.
“This process obviously has its ups and downs, but I’ve started realizing so much,” she said. “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