Cara Delevingne takes ‘joy ride’ from fashion to film

LOS ANGELES — Cara Delevingne wants you to know she didn’t strut directly from the fashion runway onto Hollywood movie sets.

The British model wasn’t hand-picked by studio executives for her lead role in “Paper Towns,” which opened this weekend. She won the part after an audition process that included 100 other actresses.

“Cara killed it in the chemistry read. We all knew as soon as she walked in,” co-star Nat Wolff said in a recent interview.

“I killed all the other actresses that went up for the role,” Delevingne joked, laughing alongside Wolff.

The 22-year-old may no longer need to be quite so aggressive in Hollywood. She appears in four more films expected to be released this year, including “Pan.” She plays DC Comics villain-slash-heroine Enchantress in the dark “Suicide Squad,” out next summer, then co-stars with Dane DeHaan in director Luc Besson’s big-budget sci-fi film “Valerian.”

“The whole thing has been a joy ride. This is my dream so I’m kind of following it now,” she said. “I don’t feel like I’m stopping modeling. It’s just definitely slowing down and so I’m just happy to be doing this.”

In “Paper Towns,” adapted from John Green’s popular young adult novel, Delevingne plays the enigmatic Margo, who wrangles Wolff’s character into an all-night adventure, then disappears.

“Cara understands better than anyone I’ve ever know what it’s like to be Margo, what it’s like to have people project images onto you and not really know you,” said Green, an executive producer on the film. “Margo is a character in the story who everybody’s paying attention to, but nobody’s ever listening to. And I think that’s probably something Cara can also relate to.”

Indeed, Delevingne says that while the promotional grind of releasing a movie isn’t so different from modeling – plenty of posing for photographers – she’s intrigued by the media megaphone provided by movie stardom.

“It’s a platform for me to be honest and to talk about issues and stuff that I think is important,” she said on the red carpet at a Los Angeles “Paper Towns” screening attended by modeling friends Kendall and Kylie Jenner.

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AP writer Marcela Isaza contributed to this report.