It’s time for one of my favorite things: reading an interview with Irina Shayk. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve grown so fond of Irina through her interviews. I love her personality and she always comes across as both hard and guileless. She had such a hard-scrabble childhood in Russia, she figured out a way to break through as a high-fashion model and not just a commercial/swimsuit model, and she still seems in awe of the life she’s built for herself in New York. Her personality has remained very Russian, very matter-of-fact, very salt of the earth. Some highlights from Irina’s excellent Elle cover story:

She decided to get her driver’s license at 31, while she was pregnant: She woke up one morning and decided: “That’s it.” She got her learner’s permit and practiced on Sunset Boulevard, hands at 10 and 2, her growing belly wedged behind the steering wheel. She gave birth to her daughter weeks later, but remained fixated on obtaining her license. Shayk took 10 lessons, two hours each. When it was time to schedule her road test, people told her to choose an area with few pedestrians to make for a less stressful exam. And a few advised her: Avoid Santa Monica. Too crowded. “So I was like, ‘I want to do it in Santa Monica. I want to be ready for everything.’” She took the test. She passed.

Her childhood after her father passed away. “My dad had always wanted to have a boy. He loved us, but when he died, I kind of felt like, ‘I have to take care of the family.’” The role suited her, in a way. “I always thought I was born in the wrong body. I hated being a girl. I remember fights with my mom; she wanted to dress me in something flowery. I wanted dark colors and something solid. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a boy, but I felt like, ‘I don’t belong to my body.’” Her sister was obsessed with hair and makeup. Shayk felt “completely opposite.” She remembers clamping down on her lips as a child, hoping to make them smaller.

The fashion industry didn’t know what to do with her: “I had agents who said, ‘You have to cut your hair, lose 20 pounds, and become blonde.’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely f–king no.’”

She made it work because she had to: “You have perspective” after something like [her father’s death], she says. “Whatever happens in my job, I’m like, ‘Everyone is alive.’ I was like, ‘I’m not going back to Russia.’”

Why she books every job she can get: “It doesn’t matter even if I’m doing it now. I have to pay my bills. I don’t have a rich husband. I don’t have a sugar daddy, so I have to pay.”

When her daughter complains that Shayk is leaving for work: “You want to go on vacation, right? You want to go shopping? So I’m going to London. You’re going to be with Daddy, because Mama has to work.” Shayk and Lea speak to each other in Russian, their “secret language.”

On the Russian invasion of Ukraine: It pains Shayk now to see the news from her homeland. Her mom and sister live near the Ukrainian border. Like a lot of Russian families, she has relatives who live in Ukraine, on her maternal grandmother’s side. “It’s devastating,” she says. “All you have to do is pray for better and hope it will be finished soon.”

Coparenting with Bradley Cooper: “We both take Lea everywhere with us. She’s super easy. Two days ago, I had to go to the gym, so I just got her a drawing book and said, ‘Mama’s working out.’ She was drawing for an hour. Then we went to the Michael Kors fitting. She met all the girls. Michael gave her a bag. She drew him a kitty cat. We always find a way… He’s the best father Lea and I could dream of. It always works, but it always works because we make it work.”

Social media criticism: “That’s what you get. Not everybody is going to like you. And I don’t want everyone to like me. I am who I am. I’m not going to change because somebody who has nothing to do in their life is saying some bullsh-t about me or how I dress or how I’m parenting. No, get your life together. Nobody wants to write something that is truthful. Sometimes I want to be like, ‘F–k you. It’s absolutely not true.’…Half of the people who they say I’m dating, I’ve never even met them in my life! These people who are literally evil or have nothing to do, sitting there and writing some bullsh-t and getting away with it. They should go to prison for that.” But this is America, so she moderates: “There should be some kind of punishment.”

[From Elle]

Elle interviewed her when she was still fooling around with Tom Brady, but that situationship fizzled out by the time this went to print. I think Irina would have liked to be more serious with Tom, just as she would have liked to get back together with Bradley. While she doesn’t say this, I get the sense that Irina is feeling her age a little bit and trying to make some plans for her future. While she knows she can take care of herself, her daughter and her family back in Russia, she’d also sort of like to have a (wealthy) partner. She’s never been married, you know? And she probably did believe that Bradley would marry her at some point. And I love her conversations with Lea – it’s so Russian!

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Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Elle’s IG.