Model-turned-actress Cara Delevingne wants people to know that she didn’t strut directly from the fashion runway on to the set of a major Hollywood movie.
The British model wasn't hand-picked by studio executives for her lead role in Paper Towns, which opens today – she won the part after a gruelling audition process involving 100 actresses.
“Cara killed it in the chemistry read – we all knew as soon as she walked in,” says co-star Nat Wolff.
“I killed all the other actresses that went up for the role,” Delevingne says, laughing alongside Wolff.
The 22-year-old no longer needs to be quite so aggressive in Hollywood. She will appear in a further four films due out in the coming year.
Delevingne plays a mermaid in Pan, a Peter Pan origin film that also stars Hugh Jackman and Amanda Seyfried, and she will co-star with Dane DeHaan in French director Luc Besson's big-budget sci-fi film Valerian.
She also stars as Enchantress, the DC Comics anti-hero sorceress, in Suicide Squad, which stars Jared Leto as Batman villain The Joker, Will Smith as Deadshot and has a cameo by Ben Affleck as Batman/Bruce Wayne.
“The whole thing has been a joyride,” says Delevingne.
“This is my dream, so I’m kind of following it now. I don’t feel like I’m stopping modelling. It’s just definitely slowing down and so I’m just happy to be doing this.”
In Paper Towns, adapted from The Fault in Our Stars author John Green's popular young-adult novel of the same name, Delevingne plays enigmatic teenager Margo, who ropes Wolff's character into an all-night adventure.
Delevingne says she found herself drawing similarities between herself and her free-spirited character.
“I’m more like her now than I was when I was her age,” she says. “I did take elements of myself from when I was like a kid, like 12, because I was very fearless and brave. When I was 18, I wasn’t that clever or great, funny or smart, intelligent.”
Paper Towns tells the story of high-school teenager Quentin (Wolff), who is enticed by Margo, his childhood crush from whom he has drifted apart, to play revenge-filled pranks on unsuspecting students, before she vanishes the following morning.
The film touches on themes of identity and defies traditional coming-of-age tropes, as Quentin embarks on a journey that has a few unexpected twists along the way.
Delevingne says acting offers benefits, such as staying put in one place for an extended period of time and building a camaraderie with co-workers, that she has not been able to enjoy in her modelling career.
“People are like: ‘You must travel so much,’ and I’m like: ‘No, I don’t see anything,’” she says. “I’ve been to everywhere but I’ve never seen any of it.”
With 16 million Instagram fans, the quirky Delevingne is already an established social-media personality, loved for championing the “embrace your weirdness” movement. Her friends include reality TV stars and fellow models, Kylie and Kendall Jenner.
Green, whose young-adult cancer romance The Fault in Our Stars became a hit film last summer, says he saw the complex, misunderstood Margo come alive in Delevingne, in part due to her own celebrity background.
“Cara understands better than anyone I’ve ever known what it’s like to be Margo, what it’s like to have people project images onto you and not really know you,” says Green, an executive producer on the film.
“Margo is a character in the story who everybody’s paying attention to, but nobody’s ever listening to. And I think that’s probably something Cara can also relate to.”
Indeed, Delevingne says that while the promotional grind of releasing a movie is not so different from modelling – plenty of posing for photographers – she is intrigued by the media megaphone provided by movie stardom.
"It's a platform for me to be honest and to talk about issues and stuff that I think is important," she said at a Paper Towns screening in Los Angeles.
artslife@thenational.ae
