‘This whole longevity thing – is it a trend now or something?’ Rita Ora asks me. Her deadpan delivery leaves in its wake a few seconds where I wonder if I should confirm that, yes, the multi-trillion dollar industry that sits under the longevity umbrella is, indeed, a big deal. But if I’m in the dark about the degree to which the singer, songwriter and actor is a card-carrying member of wellness – along with its favourite pastime, life extension – she doesn’t leave me there for long. Several minutes later – Rita’s health habits committed to both memory and Dictaphone – I suspect that this whole longevity thing has a new poster woman.
That our future-facing conversation takes place in a basement room that was once the servants’ quarters of Syon House, a Tudor mansion in west London, only adds to the sense of time travel. Together with Rita’s team – including her parents, who have come to support her on set – we spend the rest of the day moving between the grand rooms under the watchful eyes of the mansion’s minders. In the aptly named Long Gallery – a 40-metre room complete with an antique bookshelf that conceals a secret door leading out to the South Lawn – the posture Rita credits to Pilates rivals the 18th-century Corinthian pilaster that she poses next to.
It was in this very room that, in 1553, Lady Jane Grey was invited to take her place on the throne – only for her reign to reach its bloody conclusion nine days later. Nearly five centuries on, Rita’s reign has endured. That she nails each shot in a time not far exceeding her personal cold plunge record is hardly surprising given that she’s had a camera lens trained on her for the best part of two decades. She was 18 when she signed a record deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, and 21 when she landed her first UK number one with ‘Hot Right Now’. Since then, she’s collaborated with everyone from Ed Sheeran to Charli XCX, clocked up more than 10bn streams and holds the record for the most top 10 singles for a British female artist. Throw in an acting CV that features the Fifty Shades franchise and judging stints on The Masked Singer, The X Factor and The Voice, and you begin to realise why Rita’s vocal cords are among the most famous in the business.
Right now, those vocal cords are working hard. She’s writing and recording her fourth studio album – and enjoying the creative freedom that accompanies reaching the top of your game. The contentment continues at home, where she’s preparing to celebrate her fourth wedding anniversary with her Oscar-winning director husband, Taika Waititi. But if there’s a thread running through her happiness right now, it’s the health journey that she’s been on since turning 30. And as she prepares to introduce her fans to a new era of Ora, it’s this version she wants you to meet. Well, sort of. ‘People are going to think I’m insane,’ she laughs. ‘Like, “What happened to the Rita we knew?!”’
Creature of habit
Wellness, for Rita, began with illness. ‘It all started from me just trying to not get sick on tour, so I could put on the best show,’ she tells me, of how she hoped to bolster her stretched immune system. ‘There wasn’t, let’s call it a “routine”, in place. And I don’t regret it. I had the best twenties. My life changed in my twenties. My career really started to kick off and I was enjoying every second.’ Then she turned 30 – and the energy that enabled her to put on back-to-back shows, in back-to-back cities, evaporated. ‘Something just goes. It literally happens overnight. I noticed that my consistency on stage was starting to get weaker and I just was thinking, “Oh, that’s weird.” I realised I needed to start treating my body like I’m a kind of athlete, so I started to go really deep into the research.’
And so began the process of conducting her own experiments. Tracing her interest in the human body back to GCSE biology, she began to gather information – listening to podcasts scrolling the wellness internet and reading research journals. Her gateway drug? Supplements. ‘Adaptogens, like lion’s mane and ashwagandha and adding collagen to my coffee,’ she tells me, of the early experimentation that led to the morning supplement stack she keeps to today. ‘I do my green powder thing. Shake that up. Throw in some creatine and vitamin D oil. And then I do my vitamin C and collagen together – collagen doesn’t react without a good vitamin C. The vitamin C instigates the collagen to go into the…’ she stops herself. ‘I’m insane. I told you.’
Supplements stacked, thoughts turned to the timing of her meals. ‘Fasting changed everything for me – my toilet habits, my brain function, my sleep,’ she enthuses, of the 12- to 16-hour window she created by shifting her breakfast a few hours later and her dinner a few hours earlier. She discovered bone broth – a love for which she traces back to her Kosovan roots – and realising how much salt some of the shop-bought ones contain led her to make her own, an approach that she soon applied to electrolytes, too. ‘It wakes me up like that,’ she tells me, of the litre of water she consumes first thing in the morning, to which she adds salt and a squeeze of lemon.
That she was sweating more than ever meant the daily hydration hack came in handy. She started with cardio. ‘I jumped on the treadmill, which I think now, looking back, it wasn’t the right thing to do… cardio is definitely not the easiest thing to befriend.’ But it was introducing weight training that changed her relationship with movement. ‘My weights were always 1kg to 3kg and trying to get my body in the best shape possible. Then I realised, “Oh, I actually want to get strong.” And be able to bend down and pick up a pencil and my knees be okay.’ This part, she tells me, is particularly important. ‘I don’t want people to get confused with [my health journey] being about me being obsessed with my physical appearance, because I think sometimes that line gets very blurred. It’s all to do with how I feel.’
Survival mode
That Rita chose her thirties to overhaul her health is a well-trodden path – one many a WH cover star has walked. And yet, the significance of the decade ran deeper than the shelf life of a hangover. ‘I’ve been obsessed with longevity and I think it started when my mum wasn’t well, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at a pretty young age, and that subconsciously made me aware of health,’ she tells me, pulling her fluffy white robe tighter around her. Rita was a teenager in 2005 when her mum, Vera, was diagnosed at 39. The diagnosis came just over a decade after the family fled from war-torn Kosovo. As refugees, they learned English – and rebuilt their lives from the ground up. Her dad, Besnik, worked in a pizza shop before purchasing a pub in London’s Kilburn, while Vera – a trained psychiatrist – earned the qualifications she needed to practice here.
By the time Vera was diagnosed, Rita was enrolled in Sylvia Young Theatre School, down the road from their west-London home. But while she’s previously described those years for her and her siblings – older sister Elena and younger brother Don – as operating from ‘survival mode’, the memory of ‘watching someone so close to you become weak’ showed up in other ways. ‘I guess I didn’t notice at the time,’ she reflects, of the health anxiety that took hold. ‘When I would get unwell, like a cold, my head would go to the worst-case scenario. The smallest thing would get me more worried than the usual person. I was always checking, checking, checking, which would then lead me into that spiral. It got me hyper-aware.’
By her mid-twenties, she’d gone from performing in her dad’s pub to selling out arenas all over the world, but the anxiety lingered. ‘Every time I see that photo of me there, standing next to Tom Hardy, I just remember how I felt,’ she recalls, of the panic attack that descended while she was meeting the then-Prince Charles at a charity event in 2016. ‘It was like an out-of-body experience. But it was also a big wake-up call. That was one of the first times I was like, “Okay, I need to do something about this.”’ That ‘something’ became therapy. ‘It’s about perspective and I think that’s what I wasn’t trained in. Yes, you’re in the thick of it and then you realise that you’ll be alright. You just have to rationalise and look at things in a different way.’
A decade on, she continues to reap the rewards of regular therapy (‘it’s good to have a [check-in] at least once a week’), but the other habits that she’s hardwired into her week are every bit as pivotal. ‘Movement has played a huge part in my life, in helping me rationalise things,’ she enthuses, of a workout week that features five sessions, including treadmill walking on an incline, weight training and a heated HIIT-Pilates hybrid class that’s become her go-to in LA, where she lives, along with London and New Zealand. ‘My happy place is following my routine, no matter how lame it sounds. My husband is, like, “It’s insane how on your days off you book 100 appointments.” Like facial, cupping, massage. But I enjoy it. People have their treats – I like to look after myself. I’m gonna go and do a workout – it’s fun.’
Family values
If the couple don’t agree on what constitutes a day off well spent, they’re aligned on the big stuff. Rita met Taika, 50, best known for Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit, at a barbecue the New Zealand-born director was hosting at his LA home in 2018. They were friends for three years before a stint living in Sydney put them in the same place for long enough to fall in love. ‘Our common ground of our mothers being our everything was very important,’ she reflects, on the early days of their courtship. ‘And the idea of working hard. We have lots of similarities in our beliefs and morals and how we were raised – I didn’t realise that Albanian and Maori culture are very similar.’
Rita proposed on holiday in Palm Springs and the couple said their vows a few weeks later at their Hollywood Hills home; among the eight guests were Rita’s sister, Elena, who walked her down the aisle, and Taika’s two young daughters from his first marriage to film producer and director Chelsea Winstanley. ‘What works for us is the sense of respecting each other and just being mates and having fun,’ she reflects, when I ask what four years of marriage has taught her. The advice applies to step-parenting, too. ‘I don’t know if anything really prepares you, you just have to figure it out in the moment. I’ve loved every second – the girls are just a dream. I think I got very lucky. We have a lot of fun – doing nails, going shopping. I love hanging out with them.’
As for future-proofing her fertility, Rita – who was doing heated workouts before they were cool and has long-cherished her well-worn copy of the 2014 book The Body Keeps The Score – was predictably ahead of the curve. ‘Everyone went mad,’ she recalls, on the media’s reaction to her freezing her eggs, which she did at 24, then again at 27. A decade – and an estimated tenfold increase in the fertility preservation procedure – later, she feels somewhat vindicated. ‘Now everyone’s doing it. [Back then] a doctor told me it was a really good time to preserve the best quality [eggs]. It was actually the best advice, because now I’m in my mid-thirties and I have a lot of friends really trying to figure it out.’ Her own plans are still on ice. ‘It will just be more of an expansion when the time comes,’ she says, before giggling: ‘Davina [McCall] is always like, “Hurry up – you can do it!”’
New beginnings
For now, other plans are afoot. Filming has just finished on Voltron (a live-action adaptation of the 1980s TV series), she and Taika are developing a musical based on Fyre Festival, and there’s the small matter of that fourth album. That’s before the always-on projects; Typebea, her haircare range, a partnership with Primark in its third year and an ambassadorship for the children’s humanitarian aid charity Unicef in its seventh. I suspect the latter feels particularly pertinent right now. ‘People that you love are immigrants,’ she says, when I ask her how she feels about the current hostile discourse. ‘There are so many incredible artists, like Freddie Mercury and Sade, that have called the UK home. This is my home, and my parents immigrating here gave me this amazing life. So I’ve been very vocal about not stopping people’s opportunities and trying to be a really great example of that. That’s the ultimate goal – for those kids to feel like they can make their dreams come true.’
As for being her body’s chief wellness officer, she has big plans for Q2: NAD+, red light therapy and oxygen therapy all feature – and it should come as no surprise that the woman who froze her eggs in her twenties is using her thirties to prepare for menopause. ‘I learned a lot from Davina while working with her on The Masked Singer. My mother’s treatment stimulated menopause at an early age for her. So I’m trying to get ahead of it and learn about it.’ When she’s not thinking about the future, she’s trying to live in the present. ‘It’s about enjoying the process. That’s what I’m trying to do with this record, actually. And it’s really working. I’m finding a sense of joy in the process, rather than thinking, “What’s everyone going to think?” It takes a while, but I really feel like I’m getting it now.’ If there’s a secret to longevity, it might just be this.
Photography: Zoe McConnell
Styling: Saskia Quirke
Make-up: Mona Leanne at The Wall Group using Tom Ford Beauty
Hair: Fabio Petri at The Wall Group using OUAI
Manicurist: Michelle Humphrey at LMC Worldwide using Essie
This interview features in the April 2026 issue of Women's Health – out now. Subscribe to WH by hitting this link.
Lauren is a lifestyle journalist with digital and magazine experience. Find her covering all aspects of wellness - from fitness, nutrition and mental health, to beauty and travel. Morning HIIT, a lunchtime oat latte and evenings ensconced in a hyaluronic acid-infused sheet mask are her own personal feel-good pillars.
