Saturday afternoon at an immaculately styled location house in Turnpike Lane and Cara Delevigne is watching RuPaul’s Drag Race on her phone. Barefaced, folded into a make-up chair, dressed in a black tracksuit that swamps her petite frame, she looks about a decade younger than her 31 years. The model-turned-actress smiles hello just as the hairstylist blasts her with a dryer.
We are here to talk about her upcoming role in Cabaret, the iconic musical set in the hedonistic nightclub scene of interwar Berlin; she’ll be playing the lead, Sally Bowles (opposite Luke Treadaway as the Emcee). It’s a storied part that won Liza Minnelli an Oscar for Best Actress in 1972 and — since Cabaret’s multi-award-winning West End reprisal — has seen a revolving cast of high-profile women (from Jessie Buckley to, most recently, Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem) feted for their own interpretations. ‘I wasn’t sure whether I should go and see it before I start, because Jake [Shears, who currently plays the Emcee] and RLT are both musicians and while I am [a musician], I’m not a singer, you know, in the same way. But I think everyone brings something different.’ For her own version, she has resisted trying to emulate any one person; she doesn’t find the process useful. ‘I’m just not great at being a carbon copy of someone else.’
