The
Singer is starring alongside Jude Law’s son in a modern-day remake of Oliver Twist. How did they find working with a film legend – and what did he think of working with them?
“The thing everyone knows about me,” says Rita Ora on a bitterly cold afternoon in November 2019, “is that I’m a bit OCD about
fashion.” Fourteen months later, of course, this will not be the first thing that springs to mind when people hear her name, if it ever was. The one fact everyone now knows about Ora is that she twice breached England’s Covid-19 regulations, first by failing to self-isolate after a trip to Cairo, where she had performed a private concert in November 2020, and then by throwing a party for 30
Friends, immediately upon her return, in a
London members’ club, in defiance of the six-person limit for indoor gatherings.
But when we meet in late 2019 on a film set in east London, the only explaining she needs to do concerns her outfit: leather aviator hat, fingerless gloves, black sleeveless trenchcoat and fishnets. This is her get-up as Dodge – the street urchin formerly known as the Artful Dodger – in Twist, a modern-day spin on Dickens. The singer, who at that point is about to turn 30, is one of two beneficiaries of gender-flipped casting in the movie: Bill Sikes has been reimagined as a snarling lesbian played by Lena Headey from
Game of Thrones. Jude Law’s baby-faced 23-year-old son Raff is Oliver Twist, now a graffiti artist with a talent for parkour. Michael Caine is Fagin, David Walliams a smug art dealer. Leigh Francis, AKA Keith Lemon, has found time in his schedule to play a
comedy traffic warden.