LONDON — It was not a confession, exactly. More like a reluctant confirmation of something the entertainment industry had whispered about for years, extracted with characteristic patience by Louis Theroux and delivered by Cara Delevingne with the careful, measured phrasing of someone who has spent considerable time deciding what to carry forward and what to leave behind.
On the seventh season of Theroux’s podcast this month, the British model-turned-actress, in conversation ostensibly about her new film “Club Kid” and her return to professional life after a difficult personal period, confirmed what had long circulated as unverified speculation: she and Amber Heard had been romantically involved. The timing, Delevingne was at pains to establish, was after Heard’s 2016 divorce from Johnny Depp. Not before. Not during the marriage.
“Later, after they divorced, it had, I suppose,” Delevingne told Theroux. It is the kind of sentence that gains weight the more carefully you parse it. The “I suppose” is doing considerable work.
The admission lands differently depending on what you remember from the 2022 defamation trial that transformed Heard and Depp into the most scrutinized divorcing couple in recent entertainment history. Delevingne’s name surfaced during those proceedings as well. Theroux noted to her directly that Depp had been “driven crazy by jealousy” over the possibility that she and Heard were involved while the marriage was still intact. Delevingne was unambiguous about the chronology. “He was pretty driven crazy by jealousy. Nothing was happening at that point.”
What was happening came later: a complicated entanglement that developed as the marriage dissolved and its legal and personal aftermath played out. Delevingne described their connection as close from early on, and the shift from friendship into something more as gradual rather than sudden. “We were close for a long time,” she told Theroux, “and then when they were going through the divorce, yeah, we were entangled.”
The link between the two women has a specific Hollywood geography. Both appeared in the 2018 film “London Fields,” based on Martin Amis’s novel, a production Depp was also connected to and which has served as a recurring reference point in accounts of his jealousy during this period. The film had a troubled release and made little commercial impression. The relationships formed around it have proven considerably more durable as subject matter.
Theroux, characteristically, did not leave the conversation there. Heard had not directed her attention exclusively toward Delevingne during this period, Delevingne acknowledged plainly. “She was also entangled with other people.” When Theroux named Elon Musk, Delevingne did not contest it. Heard and the technology executive were publicly linked in the period after her separation from Depp, a relationship that lasted until early 2018, and their involvement was raised repeatedly during the 2022 trial as the jury considered the texture of Heard’s personal circumstances during the years in question.
The trial itself was the pivot on which much of this period turns. A Virginia jury found that Amber Heard had defamed Depp in a 2018 Washington Post opinion piece describing herself as a survivor of domestic violence, a piece that did not name Depp but which the jury concluded was unambiguously about him. Depp was awarded $10 million in compensatory damages. Heard’s counterclaim won her $2 million on a narrow finding regarding a statement made by Depp’s attorney. The verdict, on its principal counts, effectively ended Heard’s career momentum at the moment it was delivered.
She has not appeared in a film since.
Delevingne’s own trajectory in the years since has traced a different arc. She has spoken publicly about mental health difficulties, a period of withdrawal from professional obligations, and the work of rebuilding. “Club Kid,” directed by Jordan Firstman and screened at Cannes this year, represents her most visible return to the industry, a project that placed her back in the kind of conversation she once inhabited as one of the most photographed figures in global fashion.
The Theroux interview was framed, in its published arc, around that professional return: questions about modeling, about acting, about the nature of celebrity and what comes after it. Heard’s name, and the years it encapsulates, arrived in that conversation as a sidebar rather than its stated purpose. The disclosures were significant precisely because they were not the point of the interview.
What remains unresolved is almost everything that follows from the confirmation itself. The specific timeline of when the relationship began and ended, what it looked like in practice, and what either woman carries from it into the present: none of that was addressed. Heard has not commented publicly. Delevingne did not elaborate beyond what she offered to Theroux, as The Hollywood Reporter first reported.
What she did offer was the essential clarification that four years of trial coverage and tabloid speculation could not fully establish: the relationship came after, not during. In a story where sequencing has mattered enormously to a great many people, that single sentence, “later, after they divorced,” is the headline.
As of publication, Heard’s representatives had not responded to requests for comment.
