Cara Delevingne is detailing her sobriety journey.
Six months after paparazzi photos of the model at Los Angeles' Van Nuys Airport sparked concern among fans, the model, 30, shared that she's sober and that she'd checked herself into rehab late last year.
"I hadn't slept. I was not okay," she told Vogue for its April cover story published March 8, recalling how the pictures were taken in September after she'd returned from Burning Man and was on her way to work. "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."
In fact, the photos prompted Delevingne's friends to rush to her side.
"From September, I just needed support," she recalled during the January interview at her L.A. home. "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.'"
And the Carnival Row actress knew she was ready for a change. "I've had interventions of a sort, but I wasn't ready," she added. "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, Delevingne checked herself into rehab to receive therapeutic support and she 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," she explained. "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 reflected on her early experiences with alcohol when she was as young as 7 years old, adding that she also watched her mom, Pandora, struggle with addiction.
The coronavirus pandemic didn't make things easier as the Paper Towns star found herself alone following her breakup with Ashley Benson and experiencing, as she put it to Vogue an "existential crisis" about not being able to work. When the world began to open up again, she returned to partying during her free time from projects. But after seeing the the airport paparazzi pics in September 2022, she knew she wanted to live life differently.
And Delevingne, who noted she's now more than four months sober, is committed to the journey.
"This process obviously has its ups and downs, but I've started realizing so much," she told Vogue. "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."