Louis opens with an unusually candid admission: he doesn't know much about fashion, but he's curious about the world Cara inhabits. He sketches her career — from being scouted at 16, twice named British Fashion Awards Model of the Year, becoming Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel muse, to her acting roles in Paper Towns and Suicide Squad. He flags that Cara became sober in 2022 and has since launched a music career with debut singles I Forgot and Out of My Head from her forthcoming album Not Normal, framed around her recovery. He also delights in describing his evening at Cara's Leak Street gig, where he found himself rubbing shoulders with Paul McCartney and Woody Harrelson in what he's clearly claiming as the VVIP zone — and offers both an open podcast invitation. A note about early technical issues with the video feed, and then into the conversation.

The conversation kicks off with the shared experience of the night before — Cara's gig at Leak Street, a cavernous railway arch in London. Louis, who was standing beside Paul McCartney without speaking to him, asks why McCartney was there; Cara explains her long relationship with Stella McCartney, his daughter and fashion designer, meaning Paul and Nancy have taken a shine to her. Her band, blissfully unaware of the legendary audience member, only found out afterwards. Cara is candid about the acoustic perils of the venue: train vibrations shake wires loose from synths, meaning she spent stretches of the show with nothing in her ears. With characteristic bravado, she notes that since no one in the crowd knew the music yet, she could have sung anything and nobody would have known.

When Louis asks how the modelling career took off, Cara paints an unlikely picture: she was first scouted at 16 at a rave, but dismissed the idea because she thought of herself as a 'feral Chucky doll'. She dropped out of school with depression, her parents insisting on employment as the condition of leaving, and joined Storm — the agency that also represented Kate Moss — via her sister. It was never a passion; she describes it as a job she worked hard at, not something that creatively fulfilled her. The industry wasn't instantly receptive either. At 5'7.5" — below the 5'10" runway standard — her card was listed at 5'8" or 5'9". The breakthrough moment was Burberry, which she credits with catapulting everything. Even so, the comparisons to Kate Moss felt both exciting and impossible to live up to.

Louis, candidly confessing his non-expertise, presses Cara on what the actual skill of modelling consists of. She makes a sharp observation: knowing angles, lighting, and movement is a genuine skill, but it's a strange and narrow one. More damaging is the psychological toll — constant awareness of your own appearance creates a breeding ground for insecurity, and Cara says she has never encountered more insecure people than in that industry. Then comes Karl Lagerfeld, introduced via Louis's vivid physical description (candy floss ponytail, Harry Hill collar, fingerless gloves, dark glasses). Louis reads Lagerfeld's famous verdict: 'She's not a standout beauty' and the Charlie Chaplin analogy — a genius-like expressiveness better suited to silent movies than talkies. Cara agrees with the assessment and traces it to an era when fashion had become an army lineup of identically expressionless models; she brought slapstick and movement and was Marmite for it. ^{[1] — Louis Theroux "She's a kind of genius, like a character out of a silent movie. I would see her better in a silent movie than a talkie because she over-acc…" 13:20 Play}

Louis quotes Jameela Jamil calling Lagerfeld a 'ruthless, fatphobic misogynist', and Cara immediately recalls their tweet battle. She'd just landed in Milan when the criticisms went public; her reaction was emotional rather than rational — not that Lagerfeld didn't say horrible things about women, but the day after his death felt too raw. She acknowledges the fashion industry itself may be inherently misogynistic and fatphobic but pushes back on the timing. Louis and Cara riff amusingly on the mechanics of a tweet war — who goes first, how you know it's over, who wins — before Cara lands the sharpest line of the exchange: 'You know who wins? The people running the tech platforms.' She deleted the app. They're fine now, she adds.

A throwaway Lagerfeld quote about models and having their 'pants pulled about' opens a much darker door. Cara confirms — without much hesitation — that sexual assault was rampant in fashion at that time. She focuses on test shoots as a vector: young photographers (she questions the motives of straight male photographers of models), mostly unprofessional, who would offer underage girls alcohol and then escalate. The specific incident she returns to involves two girls, aged 15 and 16, whose mothers were present when a photographer asked them to get naked together in a bathtub. Cara, at 17 and the only person of legal age, refused. Their mothers agreed. The photos still exist, she says, and they're horrible. She is careful to distinguish exploitation from legal sexual assault but is clear about the atmosphere of systematic violation. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Cara says sexual assault was rampant in the fashion world when she was coming up. Test shoots were a common vector: young photographers wou…" 18:20 Play}

Louis moves carefully into the territory of substance use, and Cara is precise about the distinction that mattered most to her: it wasn't that she was constantly high, it was that her relationship with drugs was the problem. They were her comfort in loneliness, her reward after hard work, her emotional regulator. Rather than taking time off after a film shoot, she'd use benders as the holiday. She draws an interesting distinction with alcohol — the hangovers, the loss of control, the spinning — none of which appealed to her. Drugs offered a particular kind of control that alcohol didn't, even if that control was illusory. This tension between the desire for control and the actual effects of what she was taking becomes a recurring motif throughout the episode. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "They were my best friend. They were my support. They were the thing that I could control my emotions with, I thought. They kept me going. T…" 20:55 Play}

Louis admits he's never taken ketamine — with mild embarrassment — and Cara is gently disabused of the idea it's just a horse tranquiliser. She explains the clinical reality (it's a hospital anaesthetic) before describing her own use: she wasn't taking small recreational doses, she was doing long lines explicitly to knock herself out. The phrase she uses is telling — she wanted 'to disappear'. The tolerance she built was staggering: she gives away what she considers a small amount to a six-foot-five man at a party, tells him it will floor him, and is proved right every time. At the time she wore it as a badge of hardcore bravado; she acknowledges now it was probably frightening for people around her. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Cara didn't take ketamine recreationally — she used it to disappear. She describes doing enormous lines not for a buzz but to fully tranqui…" 23:18 Play}

The conversation turns to mental health when Louis circles back to Cara's disclosure about leaving school at 15 with depression. She corrects 'breakdown' to something more specific: she lost touch not with reality but with the will to exist — suicidal ideation, self-harm, a loud internal voice pushing her toward disappearing. What's striking is the early onset: she describes going into the sea as a child with the intention of swimming until she couldn't swim anymore. Not a sudden crisis but a low continuous hum of self-erasure. She is calm in the telling of it, which makes it land harder.

Louis asks carefully about Cara's mother, and Cara opens up with characteristic candour. Her mother experienced both mental health and substance issues, alongside serious physical illness — including a near-death caused by a toxic herbal tea from a monk in Thailand that caused her bowels to rupture and left her with a colostomy bag. Cara describes her mother as a medical marvel who doctors cannot believe is still alive. But the emotional legacy of that childhood is what Cara really unpicks: she was so consumed with monitoring her mother's survival — listening for her breathing at night, checking she was still there — that her own needs simply didn't register. The anger that accumulated from feeling unable to save her mother, she says, couldn't go outward, so it went inward. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Cara grew up checking whether her mother was still breathing before she could sleep, terrified of finding her dead in the night. Her mother…" 26:35 Play}

With disarming openness, Cara describes what happens when she gets angry in her current relationship: she has never been someone who screams at a partner or names-calls, but the pressure of unexpressed emotion has to go somewhere. For most of her life, that somewhere was herself — punching walls, scratching, cutting, trying to slam her head into surfaces. She frames it not as pathology but as learned necessity: if it doesn't go outward, it goes inward. In sobriety, she has learned to freeze rather than move, though the internal voice of self-hatred becomes correspondingly louder. She is unmedicated by choice, having found her own remedies, and is clear that medication is an option she would take if she became dangerous to others or herself. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Angry that I couldn't save her. Angry I couldn't fix the problem. Because I really thought I could. I think that's the root of where it cam…" 29:05 Play}

This is the most psychologically dense section of the conversation. Cara describes an abandonment dynamic she has come to understand clearly: she doesn't ask for closeness directly; she provokes. She pushes people to see if they'll leave, and if they do, the worst belief is confirmed — that she is an unlovable monster and nobody who really knew her could stay. She is careful to distinguish this from jealousy or possessiveness, framing it instead as a deep structural belief about her own worthiness. She traces it to a feeling, never consciously held but emotionally operative, that if her own mother's love was insufficient to overcome her illness, then Cara must be the most unlovable person in the world. She knows rationally that this isn't true. The feeling runs deeper than reason. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "I'll test them because in my head I start thinking that the person I love is going to leave no matter what I do. So I start pushing them to…" 32:25 Play}

With drugs removed from the equation for the first time, Cara says her current relationship feels qualitatively different from everything that came before: the first experience of love that isn't filtered through substances or displaced by work. She is aware the intensity tips toward codependency — if the relationship isn't okay, she isn't okay — but considers it a more honest place to be than the numbness of before. Louis then asks about marriage; Cara says she does want a family, eventually. Then, almost in passing, she reveals she has previously been engaged — and it wasn't publicly known. She had also proposed to someone. She declines to name either party but offers a sharp psychological reading of why engagement appealed: it was an extra hoop for someone to jump through before they left. Not a desire for marriage — an anxiety management strategy. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Cara says her current relationship feels like the first time she has ever truly been in love, because she is finally experiencing it withou…" 34:35 Play}

Louis navigates the question of Cara's sexuality with care. She explains her journey through the labels — bisexual, pansexual, lesbian — noting that finding men attractive doesn't preclude identifying as gay if you've never been in love with a man. She reflects on how hard being gay still was, even in an era of apparent openness: the instinct to take the easier path, the social pressure to pass as straight, and the feeling of not being fully seen even by the people closest to her who loved her. Then she drops the Harvey Weinstein disclosure: he called her directly to warn that being seen with a woman would end her acting career. She believed him. The revelation captures with brutal clarity how systemic homophobia operated in Hollywood — not as abstract prejudice but as explicit, targeted instruction from the most powerful gatekeeper in the industry. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Harvey Weinstein called Cara directly and told her to never be seen in a relationship with a woman, warning that being perceived as gay wou…" 40:05 Play}

Louis, with what he admits is slightly mischievous relish, pivots from sexuality to Cara's acting career via London Fields. He reads the 0% Rotten Tomatoes verdict and the most damning critical quotes: 'horrendous, a trashy tortured misfire' from The New York Times; Variety's observation that sometimes you adapt an unadaptable book just to prove how unadaptable it is. Cara's response is a masterclass in graceful deflection — she agrees the Variety line is well said, notes the book by Martin Amis is incredible and the script seemed strong, and accepts that the film simply didn't work. She likens the distinction to winning a Razzie. Louis promises the 0% is real; he checked after the episode. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "London Fields, the 2018 adaptation of Martin Amis's novel starring Cara, Billy Bob Thornton and Jason Isaacs, holds a 0% rating on Rotten T…" 42:10 Play}

Louis describes the pivotal paparazzi photos that became a cultural moment: Cara at the airport after Burning Man, dishevelled, smoking, wearing a Free Britney t-shirt. Cara fills in what the photos didn't show: she'd had a seizure from the volume of drugs, packed up her enormous Burning Man luggage, got home to LA and found — then took — more drugs before heading to the airport. She hadn't slept. She hadn't showered. The sand was still in her hair. You can see it in the eyes, she says: absolutely wild and feral and not well. The photos went everywhere; jobs dried up. Brands didn't fire her directly but simply didn't renew. That public collapse, she says, was when she knew she needed to get sober — and the silence from the industry made it inescapably real. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "After days without sleep at Burning Man, Cara had a seizure, scored more drugs at her LA home, and arrived at the airport barefoot, wild-ey…" 44:00 Play}

Even knowing she needed to get sober, Cara couldn't sustain it: the more sober she became, the more clearly she could see the damage she'd done, and that clarity was its own unbearable pain. She relapsed and overdosed — she suspects opiates had been cut into the cocaine she'd bought. Her girlfriend called an ambulance; paramedics administered Narcan at her home. Cara woke up being held down by strangers, confused and going straight into withdrawal, the first coherent thought being a wish to die. Not because she wanted to end her life, but because coming back into consciousness meant facing the pain in the faces of the people she loved most, and knowing what she'd just put them through. That shame, she says, is one of the most painful experiences of her life. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Cara overdosed — likely on fentanyl-laced cocaine — and was revived with Narcan by paramedics at her home. Waking up restrained, surrounded…" 46:56 Play}

The aftermath of the overdose becomes the real turning point. A sober mentor made Cara a striking offer: stay sober for a year, and he'd personally buy her a kilo of cocaine to see if she still wanted it — not as provocation, but as absolute certainty that anyone who reached that milestone would never go back. She stayed. He was right. The cycle stopped being fun. She was praying daily for it to end and wanting to create something good from the wreckage. Music had always been there, but she hadn't loved herself enough to believe she could do it. Sobriety changed that: the process of self-forgiveness, of accepting the dark and the light in equal measure, gave her the artist's perspective she needed. The debut album Not Normal is the direct product of that process — and she speaks about it as the beginning of something, not a conclusion. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "A sober mentor made Cara a wild offer: stay clean for a year, and he'd buy her a kilo of cocaine to see if she still wanted it. The point w…" 48:08 Play}

The conversation pivots to the music itself. Louis describes the sonic territory: plaintive melodies colliding with industrial distortion, experimental and unpredictable — like The Tunnel, Cara offers. Co-produced with BJ Burton, who she describes as the architect of the sounds she had to occasionally pull back from (too much distortion). She writes alone and then collaborates in the studio. Then Louis surfaces a brilliant piece of music industry history: before modelling broke, Cara had a development deal with Simon Fuller, the man who managed the Spice Girls. He liked her songs but wanted to cut her hair, dye it green, and rename her either Spike or Spark. She turned it down. Music was always going to happen, just on her own terms. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Before modelling took off, Cara had a shot at a music career via Simon Fuller, the man behind the Spice Girls. He liked her songs but wante…" 52:24 Play}

As the conversation winds down, Louis asks where Cara stands on sobriety. She's completely clean, she says, but not doing AA meetings — not her thing. She's clear on the operating principle: once something enters her, control disappears. She leaves open the possibility of medicinal hallucinogens for PTSD at some point, noting they're apparently more effective than ketamine. The tour continues — Paris, America — and she's already thinking about the next album. She closes with the best line in the episode: 'Music is my drug. I did the sex and the drugs, now the rock and roll.' Louis's solo outro is typically self-aware: he riffs on tweet wars, the improbability of two 0%-rated films in conversation, the mystery of who his Scientology documentaries score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the ongoing open invitation to Paul McCartney and Woody Harrelson. ^{[1] — Cara Delevingne "Music is my drug. It's funny, I did the sex and the drugs and now the rock and roll." 55:29 Play}