Cara Delevingne: Who Is She And How Did She Get The Star Role In Paper Towns?

Paper Towns came out in theaters last Thursday, and it had quite the following. The John Green novel turned movie debuted with more than $12.5 million at the box office over the weekend. That’s not bad at all for a non-franchise film marketed towards teenagers.

The reviews for the film have been fairly positive for the film as well, with a 7.1 rating on IMDB, and a 68 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of these reviews, one thing stood out above the rest: Cara Delevingne’s performance. Which begs the question: Who is she and how did she get the star role in Paper Towns?

Delevingne is a 22 year old British actress. She began her career as a tween supermodel and has modeled for brands such as H&M, Chanel, and Burberry. She is one of the most recognized models in the United Kingdom.

Despite her success as a model, Cara has admitted that she has always wanted to be an actress, and she’s even had a few big-screen appearances before this one. She had a very brief appearance in Anna Karenina, starring Kiera Knightly, as well as a small appearance in The Face of an Angel. She is also one of the supermodels in Taylor Swift’s hit music video “Bad Blood.”

But her lead role in Paper Towns was a little surprising after such a thin acting history. Paper Towns follows the story of Quentin Jacobsen, who has such a major crush on Margo Roth Spiegelman, the attractive and popular girl next door, that he’ll follow her anywhere, including on an adventure to enact revenge on a series of wrongdoing classmates. When she disappears later on, Quentin and his group of odd ball friends set out to find her.

Margo Roth Spiegelman is a bit of an odd character herself, and according to John Greene, Delevingne is a great fit for the character. He talked to USA Today about her.

“She is (bleeping) crazy. I don’t know if you can put that in the paper. But I have never met anyone like her.”

Her antics behind the scenes are nothing short of eccentric. For starters, she dressed up like a hot dog. She found the hot dog suit in an antique shop and showed up to the set wearing the giant frankfurter, swinging a string of bananas that she also found at the store.

“At that point I was so used to Cara and her craziness. It didn’t even faze me. I didn’t even make a comment on it,” says her co-star Nat Wolff.

On another occasion, she bought the entire cast tickets to a water slide. A little later, she used all of the extras to create a dance video, which took just 20 minutes to make from beginning to end.

Cara Delevingne isn’t your most traditional actress, but perhaps her eccentricities are exactly what Paper Towns needed to be a rousing success.

[Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images]