Love.Life.Lara.

Between giving birth to her third child amid a pandemic and celebrating six years of her beauty business, Lara Worthington had quite the year in 2020. Leaving behind the hum of Hollywood, she escapes into the Californian wilderness for a well-earned window of rejuvenation

- Lara Worthington

If you got in a car and drove four hours north of Los Angeles, as Lara Worthington and photographer Darren McDonald did a few months ago, you might find yourself standing at the foot of one of the world’s biggest trees. Giant sequoias are ancient and enormous, towering cinnamon-barked behemoths that can climb up to 83 meters tall. Once upon a time, they grew all over the northern hemisphere. But today they are located almost entirely in a handful of groves scattered across the state of California, including the one that Worthington and McDonald holed up in for two days, creating this Marie claire photoshoot.

While McDonald was behind the camera, Worthington was committed to everything else, from styling – which included some of her own clothes – to doing her own hair and makeup. It was her idea to escape the city, away from the tentacles of a global pandemic and her “crazy” home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, actor Sam Worthington, and their three young children. “It was a special time,” she recalls, and the end results are some of her favorite photographs, mostly because they speak to her love of being immersed in nature. They are a collective of Worthington alone in the great outdoors, silhouetted against the land, water, and an endless sky above.