Cara Delevingne Gets Candid About Sobriety

Delevingne said, '"If I can do it, anyone can.'

By Ashley Turner

Cara Delevingne shares an important message for those battling addiction. "You're not alone," she told Variety at Monday's Met Gala. "If I can do it, anyone can. But you need to communicate and be honest about it as much as you can — especially with yourself."

For the first time, Delevingne talked about her recovery in the April 2023  Vogue magazine cover story. In the summer of 2022, she said that she had gone to rehab and became a member of a 12-step program.

"I think that's what I've always done with anything in this business," said the model-actress when asked about having come forward with her struggles. "Whether it's been being vocal about anxiety, depression, recovery, anything, it's just you owe it to people to talk about your struggles, because being in this world is not perfect. No one is perfect. So to be honest, it's the least I can do."

In Vogue's April 2023 issue, Delevingne talked about how she overcame her downward spiral to reach sobriety."If I was continuing to go down the road I was, I would either end up dead or, like, doing something really, really stupid," Delevingne said.  

Her shoeless appearance at a Los Angeles airport raised public concern. A photo of her disheveled, riding in an SUV with her feet hanging out the window was taken after she returned from Burning Man. "I hadn't slept. I was not okay," she told Vogue. "It's heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point, it was like, Okay, I don't look well." 

Her "super personal" docuseries, Planet Sex, was filming during this time, and she was also dealing with her grandmother, Jane Sheffield's passing in April 2022. On the eve of her 30th birthday, she threw herself a big party and vacationed in Ibiza, though she admitted she seldom left the tower of the house she stayed at.

Delevingne said her birthday was "a funeral for my previous life, a goodbye to an era," and she would "party as hard as I could because this was the end." Bruises and unknown substances marked the trip to Burning Man that followed.

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"I would climb anything and jump off stuff…it felt feral," she told Vogue. "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.'"

When she spoke to Vogue in late January, she had been sober for four months after entering rehab late in 2022. "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."

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