Cara Delevingne explains why she refuses to play one-dimensional women
Major praise to Cara Delevingne who recently opened up about the fact that there are certain movie roles she won’t play. The fierce model-turned-actress recently spoke to Time Out London and mentioned that, even though it seems like she’s taking every acting gig coming her way, that’s not at all what’s really happening. She’s simply scooping up all the multi-dimensional female roles she can get — and thankfully, there are a lot of them coming her way.
This wasn’t always the case, though. “I was being sent typecasting roles as the stupid blonde who gets killed really quickly, or the sexy girlfriend, or whatever,” She explains, “I was ready to give up on it. Or not give up, but take a break.”
Turning down roles geared towards appearance and not ability has certainly paid off for Delevingne. Instead of playing that “sexy girlfriend,” she’s landed roles like Margo in John Green’s Paper Towns (no spoilers, but Margo is very complicated) along with playing Enchantress in DC’s Suicide Squad (another very complicated female role). Those two characters couldn’t be any more opposite, and on top of that, they’re giving Delevingne the chance to flex her acting muscles and create the kind of complex character she’s looking for.
Delevingne also wants to make sure her voice is heard on set, too. “Every movie I’ve done I’ve had to fight for lines and fight for point of view. Usually it’s a male director, male producers. It’s all very much a man’s point of view. I speak up and say, ‘Girls don’t do that’. Or, ‘That’s not something a girl would say in that situation’. It’s about how men perceive women and it’s not accurate, and it annoys me!”
It annoys us, too, but we’ve got Delevingne in our corner, fighting for more true-to-life female roles. Thankfully this is only just the beginning of her long and awesome acting career, so we can expect way more complicated Delevingne roles to come. We can’t wait.