Cara Delevingne: Modelling 'really f****ed me when it came to acting'

Actor and supermodel said she had to learn how to forget the cameras while filming a non-speaking role opposite Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina

Cara Delevingne has revealed she struggled with early film roles because she had to shake off habits she had picked up from her modelling career.

The supermodel landed one of her first roles opposite Keira Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in director Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, where she appeared in a non-speaking role as Princess Sorokina.

However, Delevingne apparently had some trouble forgetting about the cameras, as Wright had to constantly remind her to “stop trying to look pretty”.

“Fashion really f***ed me when it came to acting,” she told Elle UK magazine. “When I did my first film – Anna Karenina, in which I didn’t have a speaking part – every time I was onscreen, the director would come up to me and say, ‘Cara, you’re modelling again, stop trying to look pretty’.”

She continued: “I was an extra with 60 other people onscreen at the time. I was like, ‘But what do you mean?’ And he’d tell me, ‘You’re not in the moment, you’re just trying to look hot’.”

She explained that not performing for the camera was a difficult thing to adapt to: “I never thought I did that,” she said. “Modelling makes you know where the camera is at all times, and you have to forget that when you’re acting.”

Since Anna Karenina, Delevingne has had lead roles in films including Suicide Squad, Pan, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

She is currently starring in new Amazon Original series Carnival Row, in which she plays a bisexual fairy in a neo-Victorian fantasy world.

“It’s a lot of different storylines and a lot of different characters and creatures,” she said. “It’s made for geeks and fanatics and people who like to go into the depths of another world. To be honest, if I didn’t have the script to read, I’m not sure I would have understood it all from the start.”