It’s the sort of entrance Star Wars fans eager for Episode IX – The Rise Of Skywalker will relish: the Resistance has launched its long-awaited counteroffensive; smoke plumes rise into the sky as inhabitants flee the growing conflagration; a bounty hunter with a drawn blaster looms from above, intentions and allegiances unknown; and a pair of stormtroopers scurry off as arguably the most powerful figure in the galaxy alights from her vehicle. It’s Daisy Ridley, Rey, the instinctive, humble Force-sensitive heroine, hazel-green eyes hidden behind a pair of shades, as when we first met her scavenging on Jakku in Episode VII – The Force Awakens.
As the 27-year-old actor takes off her sunglasses, the landscape comes into focus without the tinted filter: a sunny day in LA. The city is besieged by wildfires, as is the whole state of California, though its representatives in the US Congress have moved this day to make impeachment proceedings against President Trump public. This day, it’s worth noting, is also Halloween. The young costumed stormtroopers are marching in search of candy along Melrose Avenue, where a giant billboard announces the coming of The Mandalorian, the Star Wars brand’s first foray into live-action TV.
Metaphorically and in merchandise, politically and pop culturally, thematically and in the theme parks, Star Wars, like the Force, surrounds us and penetrates us. No one more so than Ridley. She is no longer the unknown, plucked from obscurity, handed the keys to the Millennium Falcon and charged with redeeming the hallowed franchise that went adrift early in this millennium. As she exits her black Escalade SUV, Ridley and her burly, besuited driver scan the café parking lot for aggressive fans and paparazzi (a phantom menace, at least in this episode, as she’ll tell me later), a reminder she will never be unknown again. If anything, as she faces the end of the Skywalker saga and her four-year run as Rey, Ridley must wrestle with the real possibility she will never be as well known for anything else.
“Oh, God. That’s awful!” Ridley says, wincing as if about to wretch. She’s just taken a swig of a garlic wellness shot (despite the weather, Ridley has a cold or maybe allergies). “That is insanely disgusting,” she says, “but also really fucking good, so there you go.” She exhales into her hand, which she then waves toward me. “So garlicky. I’m going to smell disgusting.”
The ricochet reaction, however, could double for a commentary on the roller-coaster experience of playing Rey in the franchise: a long, hard, at times profoundly damaging and rewarding journey she is determined to see end on a high note, regardless of any aftereffects.
Dressed in a long denim skirt, a cashmere V-neck and white tennis shoes, Ridley is lithe, fresh-faced and entirely too wholesome to curse as casually as she does. She shows little patience and less pretension, speaking quickly and directly. “My really good friend’s husband said I am ‘abrupt to the point of rudeness’,” she says, endorsing the evaluation, “which I think is an amazing phrase.”
Ridley has a habit of breaking into song when the feeling strikes, launching, whether on set or in a café, into whatever tune pops into her head. At one point, she glances at her fingernails and breaks into Lizzo’s “Good As Hell”: “I do my hair toss / Check my nails / Baby how you feelin’? / Feeling good as hell...”
We are surveying the menu inside a macrobiotic restaurant called M Café. Ridley, who’s been in back-to-back photo shoots ahead of this month’s release of The Rise Of Skywalker, is famished. It’s mid-afternoon and she’s not eaten since dawn, but the menu is a bit mystifying to her. She settles on the meatless “Big Macro” burger. “If I’m completely honest, I don’t know exactly what macrobiotic means,” says Ridley, a longtime vegan. “I know that means things are living in it, right?” She pauses. “Don’t say it has to do with midi-chlorians. Please.”
You can forgive Ridley, who, at this point, has heard it all, the dad jokes and geek references galore. The series’ now-extensive canon cited like gospel, which it is to legions of fans (there is an order of devotees who have codified and live by the teachings of the Jedi). JJ Abrams, who cast Ridley and directed her in The Force Awakens and The Rise Of Skywalker, warned her: “Understand the scale,” he told her upon getting the part. “This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on a level that is inconceivable.”
Ridley calls the zealots “UPFs” (ultra passionate fans), a term coined by her costar Mark Hamill. They gather at massive events such as Disney’s D23 Expo, Comic-Con and the Star Wars Celebration – gatherings heavy on costumery and bonhomie, a bit like Halloween. On this actual All Hallows’ Eve, Ridley is doing her best to join the fun, though her idea of dress-up is decidedly more literary. “I’m going as Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre,” she says excitedly, noting she’ll be hitting a friend’s party later tonight. “My friend said, ‘That is so obscure.’ But I got some grey make-up and I have a hilarious pink gown, so I’m like, ‘Fuck it. I’ll be the crazy lady in the attic.’”
Ridley wasn’t a Star Wars aficionado growing up; she would wait on the doorstep for each new Harry Potter book to arrive in the post and adored the films. She first realised the enduring appeal of the space opera during the audition process when confronted by row after row of Princess Leia tees in Topshop. Today, Ridley is mostly at peace with the phenomenon and its ubiquity. “The other day, there were these two little boys on the street playing with lightsabers,” she says, then mimics the obligatory noise. “I really wanted to be like, ‘Hey, guys, wanna learn a move?’”
Just days before, however, she was confronted by the darker side of the celebrity industrial complex. “I was followed home by someone in a van, this fucking paparazzi person.” Ridley appears shaken and I say that, as awful as her experience was, it seems preferable to being trailed by a psychotic stalker. “But is it? Is it better? Is it even different? I was still by myself and being followed wherever I went and they now have the number plate of the car I was in... That’s where it’s more scary as a woman. I have to be so vigilant with security and keeping myself safe. It’s horrid.”
Just as disconcerting to Ridley is the way in which she began questioning her psyche and second-guessing her self-preservation instincts. “I kept thinking, ‘Am I being a drama queen? Am I paranoid?’” she recalls, her eyes welling up with tears she doesn’t allow to spill over. “I wasn’t. It was real. It was fucking real and scary.”
The world is a cyclone,” Ridley says. “See? Everything out there” – she waves her hand around and at the outside – “is the cyclone. And then there’s the solid thing at the centre of it all.” Ridley is describing her most recent tattoo (located somewhere on her torso; it’s not for public display): swirling winds around a star. “That solid star is my family.”
Ridley was born the youngest of five sisters (two full- and two half-siblings from her father’s first marriage) and immediately given a stage-ready name: Daisy Jazz Isobel Ridley. The name Jazz came at the behest of her father, a photographer who often shot for NME. Ridley cautions against making too much out of her name; it wasn’t as if her parents expected it would lead her to pursue a life as a singer or saxophonist. “It’s a risky bet,” she points out, “because you can call your child Angel and then they’re psycho.” Still, she recorded “At The Ballet” from A Chorus Line with Barbra Streisand (and Anne Hathaway) for Streisand’s 2016 album of Broadway show tunes, Encore.
Ridley grew up in Maida Vale, London, though she bristles at the notion of being a little rich girl. “We’re described as living on one of the most exclusive roads in London,” she says. “Everyone else is very fancy around us, but our house was the rickety one on the street. Whenever I get picked up for a job, everyone goes, ‘Oh, this used to be a right dump.’ So it’s that. I mean, it’s not like we were the toast of St John’s Wood.”
Although Ridley has by far the biggest profile in her family, she wasn’t the first to become famous. Her great-uncle Arnold Ridley, OBE, was a well-respected playwright (The Ghost Train) who later became a household name thanks to a starring role on the TV sitcom Dad’s Army. Ridley describes her family as bookish and indeed her grandparents opened a chain of bookstores. As a child, she was both a voracious reader and quite rambunctious.
In the past, Ridley would describe herself as a tomboy. No longer: “I now have an issue with the word ‘tomboy’. Why has there got to be a ‘boy’ in it? I was like, ‘Hold on: you’re saying a little girl is actually like a boy because she likes to be active?’ In terms of energy, I would say I do have a strong masculine energy as well as a feminine. But I was a girl. I am one.”
In an effort to keep Ridley busy, her mother suggested she attend a boarding school. “I was naughty at primary school,” Ridley admits. “But if I was occupied, I was fine.” At Tring Park School For The Performing Arts in Hertfordshire she enjoyed the structured 12-hour days. “You had to make your bed and all that discipline. Then you sing and dance and act all day. It was fun,” Ridley says, except the ballet. “I remember our head of dance said, ‘Daisy, if I could put your brain with someone else’s body we’d have a great ballet dancer.’”
It wasn’t until she had the right drama teacher at the age of 17 that Ridley truly embraced acting. She remembers the instructor correcting a classmate from Newcastle, who assumed that she couldn’t play Lady Macbeth because she didn’t have the right accent, telling her, “Who the fuck told you you couldn’t do Lady Macbeth?” It left an impression to this day: “At 17, hearing this man say, ‘You can fuckin’ do it if you want to’ was so amazing. I wrote him a letter just the other day saying thanks.”
Ridley was unceremoniously fired from her first acting gig: a play about a poet who worked in a strip club. “On the first Friday, they were like, ‘We don’t need you to come back next week,’” she recalls. Although confused at the time, Ridley sees the incident with clear eyes now: “I hadn’t done a good job. But, you know, there we go. It’s all part of the journey, isn’t it?”
By the time Ridley heard a new Star Wars film was casting in 2013, she had an agent and “had been working a day here and a day there”. She walked into the first audition with a list of credits that included a first-aid film, about CPR, a Wiley music video, an ad for Morrisons and bit parts on shows such as Youngers – qualifying her as the type of complete unknown Abrams was looking to cast. She got called back and then called back again, eventually making her way through six months of tryouts, reading dummy pages and scenes to preserve the plot’s secrecy, before landing the part. “People are like, ‘This happened overnight,’” Ridley says. “But I started auditioning in August, got the job in February and started filming in May. It was all such a long process.”
Throughout, Ridley benefited from being in the dark. “I’m glad I didn’t have more information,” she says. Abrams and Disney’s execs were looking for a wide-eyed naif entirely unaware of her powers and here was Ridley, endearingly guileless and completely comfortable being oblivious: to the process, the enormity of the task ahead and the inner workings of the movie business. “It’s sort of hilarious,” Ridley recalls, “because I’d meet all these big important people and have no fucking idea who they were.” She laughs, remembering being a hungry aspirant and blowing off the cochair of Walt Disney Studios Alan Horn. “I remember meeting him and he’s like, ‘I’m Alan,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, hey, nice to meet you’ and then I walk on. And now I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’” She can laugh it off now and proclaim her ignorance was bliss and that she wouldn’t change a thing. “If any single thing had been different,” she says, “maybe I wouldn’t have got it, so I’m so fucking glad for how it worked out.”
When The Force Awakens premiered in December 2015, the film was hailed as an homage to George Lucas’ original trilogy, both in spirit and in content. And Ridley received glowing notices for her portrayal of Rey, the plucky prodigy whose reverence for the mythology makes her a proxy for the viewer. “This is the Millennium Falcon! You’re Han Solo!” Rey proclaims, revealing herself to be a fan, just like us. She even has an action figure – OK, a crude cloth doll – of a rebel pilot in her desert hovel. Like a young Luke Skywalker, Rey grew up on a podunk planet, seemingly an orphaned scavenger, living off the wreckage of the great Star Wars battles of yore.
Unlike a young Luke, Rey has no desire to seek something bigger: she wants to stay at home, clinging to hope that the family who abandoned her will return. Much has been made of the similarities between Rey’s story and Ridley’s and for good reason. Both are anonymous figures who find themselves major players in a grand plan; wide-eyed neophytes who discover they have prodigious abilities; reluctant adventurers for whom swashbuckling is done in service of a search for stability.
It hardly seems coincidental that Abrams and the producers allowed Rey to speak with an English accent (John Boyega, who plays Finn, hails from Peckham in South London and got no such dispensation). Rey’s diction and intonation are not exactly the same as her own, Ridley says (”Rey’s is a bit flatter”), but they speak with one voice.
If Rey made Ridley an international star, Ridley made Rey an intergalactic role model – although she chafes at applying the simplistic “strong girl” appellation to her alter ego. “There is an interesting conversation that’s happening with this use of ‘strong’,” Ridley says. “It’s not because Rey is strong that she’s amazing. It’s all the complexities of a human. It’s because she is a well-drawn person who is struggling with things and you’re with her.”
Their parallels – and struggles – abounded with The Last Jedi. Filming started soon after the release of The Force Awakens, just as Ridley faced the perils of fame for the first time. She attracted social media followers in droves, amassing 2.3 million on Instagram. Ridley seemed to master the medium, slamming body-shaming Insta-bullies and calling attention to her struggles with endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome in a candid post.
But in August 2016 she quit the platform after posting a photo of herself at the Teen Choice Awards with a caption honouring the victims of gun violence in the US. She was attacked mercilessly for her views, her “hypocrisy” for acting in films that celebrate violence. The gun post was not why she quit. “I hate guns,” she says. “But if I believe something, I’m not going to run away because I’m scared.”
The reasons she left Instagram were personal, not political. She had “a lot of growing up to do”. She wasn’t equipped to handle the pressure to perform in public and share her life via posts. She needed privacy, online and off. Wherever she went, photographers chased her, people gawked at her, interrupted her meals and conversations to ask for photos. The fact this could have been predicted didn’t make it any less painful for Ridley, who was crippled by the scrutiny and continuously felt anxious, self-conscious, cornered. No sooner had she moved into a new flat than a pair of fans found her, knocked on her door and pressed her to take a photo. She would phone her mother in a crying jag, saying, “I’m not equipped to deal with this!” with alarming regularity. She began therapy, which helped.
Ridley has called her work on The Last Jedi “more of a conversation than a grand adventure”. Her scenes were often one-on-one with her character’s mentor, Luke (Hamill), or nemesis, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), or alone. Her work was well-received and her star was well and truly on the rise, but the experience, one feels, was not as joyous as in the first film.
Later, some commenters took exception to the notion that a figure as powerful and pivotal as Rey came from humble roots, as the film revealed. That didn’t sit well with Ridley, an ardent anti-elitist. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’m going to tell you something so shocking for Americans but not Brits: I don’t massively care about the royal family. I am not a royalist.”
“Buckingham Palace is great, but it’s an unused building, isn’t it?” she says. “The other day, there was a story that the Queen uses six rooms in the palace. Six. How is that a good thing? It’s prime real estate.” That said, Ridley is deeply sympathetic to the Duke and Duchess Of Sussex, calling the way they, and Meghan in particular, have been treated by the British press “truly shameful”.
By the time The Last Jedi opened, the wear was showing on Ridley. “I saw a picture of me at the London premiere and I was so skinny and my skin was terrible.” Internally, things were worse: she had developed holes in her gut wall, the result of stress. Her self-diagnosis is blunt: “My body was just fucked up. I got tests done and it turned out my body was taking in no nutrients. I was just like a little skeleton and I was just so tired. I was becoming a ghost.”
In every way, Ridley was a victim of her success: it had bred the anxiety that wracked her body and it left her in a state of exhaustion from overwork. She had heeded the advice Abrams gave her while making The Force Awakens. “He said, ‘Take your time choosing your next job. People will offer you things, but just wait till the film comes out.’ That was amazing advice.” Of course, Abrams knew the scale of Ridley’s part and quality of the performance would make her a marketable star. When the good offers came, however, she couldn’t say no. She took on two other features too close together: Sir Kenneth Branagh cast her in his remake of Murder On The Orient Express and she landed the titular role of Ophelia, a revisionist retelling of Hamlet from the perspective of the Danish prince’s often misunderstood love interest. Although the latter was panned when it premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Ridley’s performance was widely acclaimed and while the movie was later recut and much improved, it nevertheless went quickly and quietly to the small-screen market. “Some people have seen it,” Ridley says of the later edit, with a laugh. “They were very nice. So to those three people, thank you.”
Those rare few got to see the story of a confident, rebellious young woman risking losing herself in events over which she has no control. Rather than face near-certain death or take her own life – Ophelia’s fate in Shakespeare’s telling – she leaves, disappearing into self-imposed exile. And, as it turns out, so did Ridley.
I just needed to be at home and chill the fuck out, honestly,” Ridley says. With Disney’s support, she took a six-month sabbatical – another gap half-year spent at home. “Just being in London, it was so nice,” Ridley says, “not having to rush everything through. Like, I love washing my clothes – I love doing the wash – but when you’re working tons, you’ve got to smash it all in one day. This was ‘Oh, my God. I’m going to do a load today’ every day. It was lovely.”
Amid the routines of home, Ridley found other forms of normalcy beginning to return. “I started going on the Tube again. And I was like, ‘You know what? The world didn’t stop turning. It’s really fine.’ It was everybody else making me feel like this was terrifying that made it so terrifying.” She is also able to speak out when she needs to and advocate for herself. “For so long, I was so scared to say to anyone, ‘It’s not all good all the time.’ Because you know what? It’s not all good all the time. I can say that now. Say no. Now I think I’m very nicely balanced.”
When it came time to film The Rise Of Skywalker, Ridley was ready. “I was so healthy. I was so there. I was just enjoying it,” she says. “With this one, I had such a great time.”
She was able to find the light side even in the weightier moments. “There was this thing,” she says, laughing as she starts to recall. “JJ would ask us to do the scene without speaking, just to feel the emotional... whatever. He was like, ‘You never know what could come up.’ We did that a couple of times. Then it became a joke, because we would just wet ourselves laughing. I said to JJ, ‘You have to do a bloopers reel,’ because I couldn’t keep my shit together at all.”
The nature of the trilogy meant Ridley was reunited with the bulk of the cast. “Compared to the second one, it was just so nice being with a big group of people. Like, I love Mark, but it was just the two of us a lot of the time. It was so nice going back to that group feel.”
Of course, not everyone returned. Carrie Fisher passed away in December 2016 and, like everyone on set, Ridley felt her absence. It was made more awkward and difficult because Ridley had to shoot scenes with her. (Abrams unearthed footage of Fisher as Leia that was filmed for The Force Awakens and built the script for The Rise Of Skywalker around them.)
“It was definitely difficult,” Ridley says. “It was emotional doing it, because you’re also weirdly picturing her. You’re not picturing how the scene is going to be.” One such scene with Ridley acting opposite Fisher is flashed in the teaser. “It’s really sad. And it’s going to be really sad,” says Ridley. “But also, it’s amazing that they have all this footage that is woven into the story in such a strange way.”
Ridley never broached the loss with Hamill. “I would never presume. Mark’s known her for 40 years” – though she did speak with Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, who plays Lieutenant Connix in the film. “I had a conversation with Billie about it,” Ridley says, choking up. “I just wanted to ask Billie how she was doing.”
There were other tears. Ridley filmed the final scene of the shoot, if not of the film itself – a last shot that wrapped up not only her trilogy, but a filmmaking journey spanning more than 40 years. “The scene was me being very sad,” she says. “Let’s just say it was not hard to be upset in that scene.” After Abrams called cut and it wrapped, the tears didn’t stop. “I did this embarrassing speech that I can’t remember. It was so sad,” she says.
Although she hasn’t shut the door on reprising the role of Rey in some form, fashion or spin-off, Ridley hasn’t left much of an opening either, saying, “It felt like an end... I can’t actually imagine it right now... I don’t know what’ll happen in however many years.”
Ridley hasn’t seen a cut of the final film yet; apparently it is still taking shape. The day before we meet, she rerecorded dialogue for a scene that had been added back in during editing. She will get to watch the film about two weeks ahead of its premiere and she’ll use the intervening period to “process and settle with it” ahead of its release and the deluge of reactions. She’s prepared for them all.
“There are people that are never going to fuckin’ like it and there’s no other way around it,” she says. “But I think people are going to feel like this was made with a lot of love and JJ worked really hard to tie up nine films. It’s impossible to make everyone happy.
“Some of the shit people have said to me about Star Wars you wouldn’t believe,” she says. “I have had people say to me, ‘I mean, it wasn’t a great film, was it?’ I’m like, that’s just bad manners. That’s fuckin’ not nice.”
Ridley shrugs. She knows her calls for civility will only do so much. But she seems much more confident in her ability to cope. Since the most recent trailer was released, she’s felt an awakening; the paparazzi and selfie seekers have returned with a vengeance. “There has definitely been quite a shift in being recognised. It’s taken me back, but in a new, more intense way,” she says, then she winks. “I’m navigating it.”
Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise Of Skywalker is out on 19 December.
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