Dua and I meet for dinner at Mountain, a popular Michelin-star restaurant in London’s Soho. It’s just after Easter, which she has spent with her partner, the actor Callum Turner, at her family’s seaside home in Albania. Rested and happy to be back, she’s been in the studio all day, planting the first seeds of a new album, figuring out where she wants to go next. Each day she ends up with a new song. “It’s like going home with a little present,” she says.
“I turn 30 in August,” she explains over dinner, “and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because your 20s are just so tumultuous in the way you think about yourself and your body. And I don’t know, now I feel like I’ve come to a place – I’ve become better at taking care of myself and working out and dancing. I feel the most confident I’ve ever felt. I feel very empowered and strong in my body. I feel good when I’m sharing my energy with people on stage. There’s just so much of that that makes me really proud of my body and the way it holds me.”
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“Yeah, we’re engaged,” she says over dinner. “It’s very exciting.” She tells me Callum had the ring made for her after consulting her best friends and her sister. “I’m obsessed with it. It’s so me. It’s nice to know the person that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with knows you very well.”
Dua first met Callum at The River Cafe in London – she was having dinner with her dad, he was out with friends. They were introduced by the restaurant’s cofounder, Ruth Rogers, but they’d almost met many times before.
“There’s a lot of Sliding Doors moments,” Dua explains. In 2014, she was working at La Bodega Negra; there’s a photo of him outside the same Soho spot that exact same year. In 2020, they went to the same last pre-lockdown party – they later found they had photos with the same guy in the background, one hour apart. “We have so many friends in common,” she says.
A year after their brief encounter at the restaurant, Dua was in LA having dinner with her friend Mustafa the Poet, “and all of a sudden Callum shows up”. She thought: “Oh, it’s that really hot guy from The River Cafe.” He asked her what she was reading. She said Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust. “And we both just happened to be reading the same book.” Does all of that make you feel you were destined to be together? “One thousand per cent.”
As for the wedding: no plans yet. “I want to finish my tour, Callum’s shooting, so we’re just enjoying this period. I’ve never been someone who’s really thought about a wedding, or dreamt about what kind of bride I would be. All of a sudden I’m like: ‘Oh, what would I wear?’” She says she’s seen many people get engaged “and never really understood the weight of it”. Now she realises: “This decision to grow old together, to see a life and just, I don’t know, be best friends forever – it’s a really special feeling.”
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Dua has inherited Turner’s rottweiler-labrador mix, and walking Golo together in the park every morning is her “favourite thing in the world”. Despite their busy working lives, she and Callum have a two-and-a-half week rule: they won’t be apart for longer. For her Antipodean tour earlier this year they had to break it – three weeks – and found that very hard. At home, they cook – Dua’s roast dinners are, her friends report, to die for. When they travel together they explore restaurants and buy vinyl in every city. They’re listening to a lot of Chris Stapleton (Dua performed a duet with him last year); Sade and Erykah Badu are currently on repeat.
“I’d love to have kids one day,” Dua says. “But it’s like the constant question of when would there ever be a good time – how it would fit in with my job and how it would work if I went on tour, and how much time out I’d have to take. I think it’s just one of those things that’s going to happen when it happens. I love kids, but I think there’s so much more to raising a child than just loving children.”
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Dua would be the first to admit that her personal taste in fiction slants towards vicarious pain. (“We love a sad book,” her sister, Rina, told me about them both.) Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers: these are novels whose characters have suffered abuse, violence, loss. In interviewing their authors Dua has shown the natural compassion she extended, on her podcast, to the Yazidi Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad.
I wonder where this instinct comes from, and ask Dua about her greatest heartbreak. “I don’t think I’ve ever truly been heartbroken,” she says after some thought. “I think change can be painful. But I seem to pick myself up pretty quickly. I think maybe the crux of it is that everything that’s happened in my life never felt like a loss, but a lesson.”
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Dua’s daily schedule is “full, full, full, full, full”. She’s up at 6.30am and in bed by midnight and in between she does yoga, reformer Pilates, weight training, dance rehearsals. She looks after her body, she says, “like an athlete”, and thinks of her voice as a muscle. She has a singing coach as well as a speech therapist, to train her not to run her voice ragged by speaking in a raspy tone (“I love a chat”). When not on tour she’s in the studio with a producer and a fellow songwriter. She’s learning Spanish with a tutor three times a week, she reads (her friends get all their book recommendations from Dua) and when she is on tour she builds in time to explore cities and new restaurants. She loves to cook – even when just off a plane she makes pesto from scratch, not from a jar – and she eats healthily (“I never try and restrict myself from anything”). She looks after her skin, diligently washing her face three times after taking off her make-up, and once a year she sees a facialist in New York. All this, of course, while embarking on several high-profile collaborations in the worlds of fashion and beauty. In the past she has worked on a collection of clothes for Versace, been a brand ambassador for Tiffany & Co, and is a face of YSL Beauty. Notably this year she is front and centre for Chanel, both at the house’s shows and in launching the Chanel 25 handbag this past spring.
Dua’s appetite for life can’t be contained within the span of an ordinary human day – she needs every minute she can get just to meet the demands of her own curiosity. Her friend Mia laughs about this: “Maybe – a theory – she can stop time?”
“She’s been organised her entire life,” Anesa reflects. “She’s ahead of everything. The rest of us have to keep up.”
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So what do Dua’s 30s hold for the Radical empire? “I think I’d love to expand Service95 and the book club,” she says. “I’d love to publish authors. I would love to help produce them into film and TV.” She recently executive produced a documentary about the music scene in Camden for Disney+, and would like to do more. She’s keen to see the music festival she set up in Kosovo grow. And at some point she wants to look after other musicians, “maybe have my own record label, maybe represent other artists”. Overall, she’s thinking: “How can I be of service, literally, to other artists, whether that be in film, TV, books, music?” You get the impression she doesn’t so much want to conquer the world as invite it to join her.
“Can you do all that?” I ask. She throws me an “are you kidding – I got this” look. “Yeah,” she says. “Nothing’s impossible. You’ve just got to get up and do it.”
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