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[title]Rita Ora is sweating.
Beads of water are trickling down her temples. Her eyeshadow is creasing into gluey lines on her lids; her hair sitting in wisps around her forehead. But her pupils are sharp, unwavering, fixated on her immediate line-of-sight. She contracts her fist and runs her tongue over her teeth.
‘3, 2, 1…’
Punch. Right on target.
Hanging over the red ropes of a boxing ring in a Camden basement, as assistants fuss around, spraying mist to top-up her glisten, Rita Ora is concentrating on one thing: getting that shot. If it seems like she’s done this a thousand times before, it’s because she has. The pop star, actress, TV personality and tabloid magnet is one of the most recognisable, omnipresent faces in UK pop culture. In other words: she’s a pro.
Rita Ora has 16.2 million Instagram followers, has racked up more than 10 billion music streams, collaborated with high street fashion giant Primark and launched her own tequila brand. She has three albums, with another in the works. She holds the record for the highest number of top 10 singles for a British female artist, is a judge on ITV’s The Masked Singer, is a front-row regular at fashion weeks and has been to the Met Gala a sweet 10 times. And, as demonstrated by her jogging on the spot as our photographer fiddles with the camera lens, she’s certainly not used to sitting still.
‘I don’t do as much boxing as I’d like to,’ she confesses, over call, a few weeks later. (She puts part of that down to being left-handed.) These days, she’s more of a hot pilates girlie – but for Time Out London’s new cover story, she’s ready to roll with the punches.
Killer instinct
When I next speak to Rita three weeks later, she’s sitting in a car, squeezing in our conversation en route to the airport. ‘It’s a transit, one way to Budapest,’ she says, her face freezing into pixels on the screen and jolting back into focus as we move in and out of signal. ‘Oh – Lithuania then Budapest, excuse me,’ she corrects herself. As Young As Vilnius is one of eight festivals Rita has been booked to play over summer, in between travelling to and from L.A. for The Masked Singer and to do promo for Disney’s Descendants: The Rise of Red.
‘Honestly, [being] on a plane – that’s my home,’ Rita says. ‘I’ve learned to treat it as a travelling sofa.’ After more than a decade in the game, she’s mastered the art of long journeys, swearing by noise-cancelling headphones, lavender spray, an eye mask and hygiene wipes (‘there’s no time for us to get sick!’). ‘It gets overwhelming when you realise how much travel you do,’ she says, in the tone of someone who stopped complaining a long time ago. ‘And it’s not what everyone thinks, living lavishly on a jet. It’s car rides, trains, buses, tour buses…’
These days, Rita balances her life between here, L.A. and New Zealand, where she recently bought a house with her husband, the filmmaker Taika Waititi. ‘New Zealand is a beautiful place,’ she says. ‘Super cultural. I learn so much, hang out on the beach, cook BBQs. You just have to stay there for at least two weeks because it’s very far.’ Both on insanely busy schedules, the overarching goal is to create a space to ‘have a good time’. They’re even building a pub in the garden – a nod, perhaps, to the role London pub culture played in her younger years. Rita’s father owned a handful of pubs in the capital (currently, it’s The Queens Arms on one Kilburn High Road), where she’d hang out with her siblings after school and be a fly on the wall. ‘Everything was always like a family get-together,’ she says. ‘I think that made me more confident in my social skills, growing up.’
A hard work ethic was instilled from a young age: for her family, work was survival. In 1991, aged only one, Rita arrived in London with her parents and older sister to seek refuge from their war-torn homeland (a region that is now the country of Kosovo). Rita’s mother, a psychiatrist, and her father, a hospitality businessman, had to retrain and learn English while looking after three children. ‘My mom is very, very Kosovan,’ Rita says. ‘Her accent, the food – I’m always around it.’
Rita makes an effort to stay connected to her homeland: she regularly returns to support charitable missions, and in 2019, she was made a UNICEF UK Ambassador after visiting UNICEF work in the region. ‘I don’t know what’s in the water, but I’m so proud of all the amazing pop stars that have come out of there,’ she says. (Another global chart-topper, Dua Lipa, was also born to an Albanian Kosovan family who fled in the nineties.) ‘Since I started, I’ve always been a big advocate of speaking about where I’m from. It feels like a lot has happened since then.’
Hearing everyone shouting at each other in Portobello Road market was like a movie
By the time she was seven, Rita’s family had moved to Notting Hill. ‘West was everything I imagined London to be – it was vibrant,’ she says, with a hint of nostalgia. ‘It was wild. Portobello Road market was booming, [and] hearing everyone shouting at each other – it was like a movie. It had so many different scents and fashion and music. I think that’s partially why I’m so experimental.’
Rita recalls sitting on her friend’s terrace, gazing down at the sights and smells of Notting Hill Carnival. ‘I’d be looking at all this energy and smelling the Caribbean jerk chicken – literally, my mouth would be watering,’ she says. ‘Amy Winehouse would go to Rough Trade records and Mark Ronson would DJ out of there. It was such a vibe.’
Aged 12, Rita enrolled in the performing arts Sylvia Young Theatre School, growing up listening to her parents playing the Bee Gees, ABBA, The Supremes, BB King, Ray Charles and Eric Clapton. ‘I started off singing jazz and soul – then all the labels were telling me I was too young and I shouldn’t be singing songs like that,’ she says. It’s something she says misses – and has even been ‘thinking about bringing back in’. ‘I love Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett’s jazz album: it was beautiful,’ she says. ‘But we’ll see. I also am a bit of a pop princess fanatic, so I don’t know –’
These days, Rita has swapped the candy cane terraces of Portobello Road for the ladies’ pond – though she’ll return to west occasionally for a bite at Straker’s, Mike’s Cafe, or George’s Fish Bar. ‘I don’t want to be that person – but yeah, I did move to Hampstead,’ she says, letting out a chuckle. ‘[West] has definitely become more of a tourist attraction – it always has since the Notting Hill movie. But there’s still some people in the stores that I’ve known since I can remember. [Going back] is a bit of familiarity.’
Pulling the punches
Back at Camden boxing club, things are heating up. Gloves are lined up in red, blue, gold, silver. The lights are dimmed. White brick walls are stencilled with slogans like ‘You can throw in the towel or you can use it to wipe the sweat off your face’ and ‘Hit and don’t get hit’. Right on call, Rita walks out of hair and makeup, sucking on the straw of a takeaway iced latte. She introduces herself, shakes my hand, then gets straight into it: dabbing and drop-kicking and glaring at the camera like it’s a punchbag, no seconds wasted. She shows a similar efficiency when we talk on the phone. Often, she speaks in staccato sentences, the verbal equivalent of bullet points, getting the words she wants to say out with no padding: a professional in making every second count.
She’s also a professional in having her fingers in many pies – so it’s no wonder she wanted to remind everyone she was a pop star with her 2023 album You and I. ‘[The last record] was something I felt I had to reintroduce to the public, because I didn’t put an album out for a while,’ Rita says.
In the 16-odd years she’s been singing professionally, it’s not been constant smooth sailing. She initially signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation in 2008, aged just 18, and in 2012, her first single, ‘Hot Right Now’ with DJ Fresh, reached number one in the UK charts. From there, it was a steady trajectory upwards. Meanwhile, her private life was picked over by the tabloid press – her romantic relationships, her partying through her twenties – which she’s since admitted has affected her massively. She had a messy split from Roc Nation in 2015, claiming she had recorded material the label failed to release. Now, after signing a fresh record deal with BMG, she has full ownership of her masters and a new level of creative control.
The confessional, EDM-infused You and I was the result: Ora’s first album in five years and one on which she had co-writing credits on all 12 tracks. Despite climbing close to the top of the album charts however, the record’s critical reception was largely lukewarm. ‘Playing it safe,’ chided Rolling Stone UK. ‘Music to keep you from boredom in traffic,’ smirked The Independent. It’s true the singer might now provoke indifference from the music critic demographic, but another community has happily taken her under its wing. ‘The LGBTQ+ community has had my back since the beginning,’ Rita says. ‘Everything I do is with them in mind. Can I see them loving it? Do I see people in the crowd loving it? I do my part rehearsing and making sure that the shows feel really strong – that’s all I can do.’
Rita played Manchester Pride this year, donning metallic rainbow hot pants and a diamanté headpiece, and headlined the UK’s ‘unofficial pride’: the pop-fuelled Mighty Hoopla festival in Brockwell Park. ‘The crowd is always so ready to go,’ she says, reminiscing on her Sunday slot. ‘It was boiling hot. Some of my equipment kept breaking down at points. They were like, ‘‘Rita, don’t worry!’’ I ended up singing some of it A capella, then everyone started singing with me. It was just so, so welcoming. I felt so safe.’ Where does performing live rate on the Rita Ora scale of professional activities? ‘I really love it,’ she says. ‘It’s literally my favourite part. You know, I can’t tell you one corner, one crook of the Earth [that] I’ve not performed.’
Seconds out
Our art director holds up a print-out of an iconic Grace Jones photo: her arms up, wrapped knuckles pointing inward, face looking to the left. ‘This goes here, this goes there’, mutters Rita, all shiny, lubed up and doll-like; her eyes flickering back and forth from the picture as she tenses and moves her biceps left, right, up, down to replicate the pose.
In May this year, Rita put out the single ‘Ask and You Shall Receive’, an upbeat, dance-pop number accompanied by a music video which saw her jumping into a washing machine in an L.A. laundromat. ‘It wasn’t that deep,’ Rita says, of the release. ‘It just felt fun, great for summer. The goal behind the video was to introduce the world of my upcoming album, which I’m recording in September: everything’s a bit awkward, a bit off, a little less perfect. Not super polished. That’s the challenge: I like to evolve. I think it’s important to do that if you’re a musician.’
The song was co-written by Raye, who supported Rita on her Phoenix Tour in 2018. ‘Her and I have had this back and forth for a long time, helping each other out, seeing each other backstage,’ Rita says. ‘She’s my little sister, you know, so it felt like a real 360-moment having her back in my life and seeing her at the Met Gala.’ You’d be quick to draw parallels with their stories: Raye, after all, also ran into trouble with a major label. But Rita thinks the link is tenuous — and the industry has changed too much since the beginning of her career to say.
‘From where I started to where it is now is so – it’s so different,’ she says. ‘You have to feel protected because you’re putting yourself out there. It’s a blessing and a curse. You go down the route that is convenient for you, whether it’s a full record deal, or being an independent artist. I don’t want to bore you with all the math.’ She points to Shaboozey, the independent hip-hop country artist whose breakthrough single ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ topped the US Top 100, as well as Chappell Roan, whose story of ‘clicking overnight’ took her by surprise. ‘People will jump on board, as long as you’re making art,’ Rita says. ‘It’s about consistency’.
Coming out swinging
Never one to hang around, work has already started on album four. ‘We have September to finish it [the new album],’ she says. ‘That’s the goal but let’s see what happens.’ That’s, in part, because she’s on deadline for another movie: the action-fuelled He Bled Neon starring Jack O’Connell. ‘My character is a badass villain – I think people are liking this darker side of me.’
Rita has a growing catalogue of acting credits: as varied as playing a scientist in the blockbuster Pokémon Detective Pikachu to Mia Grey in the Fifty Shades film series. Most recently, she swapped her black bob for a poker-straight red wig to transform into the Queen of Hearts (of Lewis Caroll’s Alice In Wonderland) in the fourth of the Descendants franchise, a family-friendly musical following characters from various fairy tales, which arrived on Disney+ in July.
I can’t tell you one corner of the Earth I’ve not performed
‘I think I’ve gained some three year old fans, which I’m really happy about,’ she says. Again, she’s playing the bad guy: ‘I’m a villain, but I have trauma,’ she says, matter of factly. ‘Every villain has layers, which I discovered by working on this character. I was like, ‘‘wow’’ – all these villains are really just heartbroken.’
As for the Queen of Hearts – do they share any qualities? ‘She’s very deliberate with everything that she does,’ Rita says. ‘Also, she’s a fighter, she has to be brave to protect her tribe. I relate to that. And the masking at times where you feel different inside, but you have to show up in a certain way.’ I ask what she means. ‘It could be anything from feeling overwhelmed to not getting enough sleep the night before and not being on your A-game, which I always try to be every time I work,’ she says. ‘I always try to put my best foot forward.’
Winner takes it all
We only have five minutes until Rita arrives at the airport, so when I ask if she has anything coming up that she’s excited about, she pauses, before answering in a string of even shorter sentences than usual. ‘Thanks for asking,’ she says. ‘You know, honestly, it’s just the music. This new record, we’re potentially putting out a new single very soon. Just finalising that. And just keep pushing, you know.’
It’s easy to imagine that someone as polished and high-flying as Rita Ora might lack substance, or even be a bit too slick for their own good. But, for all you can glean about an individual from a photoshoot and a fuzzy phone call, she’s polite, professional, and speaks with genuine excitement about her projects. Most of all, though, she comes across as an extremely hard worker who is grateful she gets to do what she loves, day in, day out. And the longevity of her career is testament to that – after all, many of the artists who started at the same time aren’t around today.
‘After being in the industry for a while, you realise that it’s not really about you,’ Rita says. ‘It’s about the fans. Performing live, I always think: okay, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.’
Rita Ora’s ‘Ask & You Shall Receive’ is out now.
Photographer: Jess Hand @jesshandphotography
Design Director: Bryan Mayes @bryanmayesdotcom
Senior Designer: Jamie Inglis @818fpv
Photo Editor: Laura Gallant @lauramgallant
Stylist: Pippa Atkinson @pippa.atkinson
Stylist assistant: Annie Davis @anniebethdavis
Hair and make-up: Lisa Laudat @lisalaudat1 @thewallgroup using @charlottetilbury and @victoriabeckhambeauty and @typebea hair
Location: @camdenboxing
In look one Rita wears @missoni full look, @mam earcuff, @primark Rita collection hoops and @crystalhazejewelry hoops. In look two she wears @dsquared2 coat, @loleiaswim top, @tillysveaas necklace and bracelets, @moncollierbcn bangle and rings, @solangeazagury ring, @decathlonuk boxing gloves and vintage rented vest, shorts, trainers. In look three Rita wears @hanes sports bra, @decathlonuk gloves, @dsquared2 necklaces and shoes and @tillysveaas bracelets.