Adele is taking on Hollywood! With the singer confirmed to make her acting debut in Tom Ford’s forthcoming adaptation of Cry To Heaven, starring opposite Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Owen Cooper, revisit her landmark 2021 interview with British Vogue. 🔗 – – >

From The Archive: Adele Gets Candid About Divorce, Body Image, Romance & Her “Self-Redemption” Record

There is an art to being Adele, which is to say that being the world’s most fleetingly glimpsed megastar is not a status achieved by bungling your exit from a limo. It is late afternoon in Manhattan, and her low-slung Mercedes is squeezing down a narrow ramp into the basement car park of the Four Seasons Hotel, the latest manoeuvre in the 15-times Grammy winner’s decade-long mission never to be photographed unawares. We are yabbering away on the back seat behind blacked-out windows, but before the car has truly stopped, Adele – cackling, conspiratorial, complex – has flung open her door mid-sentence and, head down, is loping across the concrete at speed.

Fumbling with my seat belt and recording paraphernalia, I scramble out after her, somehow dropping my bag on the ground, as up ahead a tense security guard pointedly holds open the hotel door. I’m taking too long, and when I catch up to Adele, something like worry, and a little like annoyance, have roamed across her normally merry features. But there’s no time. Nineties thriller-style, we are rushed through some swing doors into a kitchen, past hissing stovetops and blinking staff, out into a salubrious bar and through – finally – to a cavernous private room, empty save for two cocktails standing on a table. Safely re-ensconced in her privacy bubble, the person with the first and fourth fastest-selling albums of the 21st century visibly relaxes. Fair enough. There is an art to being Adele.

Now, the artist has returned. I must say, it is pretty wow to actually meet her in the flesh for the first time, as I had a few hours earlier. It has been five long and tumultuous years – historically, sure, and personally, you bet! – since she last sat for an interview. Here in New York for a few days, to be photographed by Steven Meisel for British Vogue, she’s keen to catch the Willi Smith exhibition, so has asked to meet at Cooper Hewitt on the Upper East Side, housed in Andrew Carnegie’s one-time mansion facing Central Park. As I walk into the gardens, where her entourage inform me she lies in wait beyond a trellis, it is safe to say proceedings take on a touch of the Greta Garbos.