Daisy Ridley has navigated immense professional success that few actors of her generation have experienced. She was cast as Rey, the heroine in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, across three blockbuster films. However, beginning life as a sudden celebrity and managing the franchise’s notoriously passionate fan base presented unexpected challenges.
“Understand the scale,” director J. J. Abrams told her when offering Ridley the career-defining role of Rey. “This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on an inconceivable level.” At the time, Ridley eagerly accepted, but the full impact was impossible to foresee.
“When all of the craziness was going on,” Ridley recalls of the intense Star Wars fame, “I was like, ‘I’m good. I’m coping fine. Everything’s fine.’ And I was fine, for the most part. But I think what I was grappling with was that it was my normal, but it was not normal to other people.”
Paradoxically, though surrounded daily while making Star Wars, Ridley also found the experience isolating. “There’s this projection of you, and you in that world, and how it feels to do this and that,” she explains. “And you’re like, ‘Well, actually, I’m just a human being, separate from that.’ It’s quite this wrestle, of the reality and the fantasy that’s often projected onto you.”
Ridley has previously been candid about having lived with skin issues brought on by her extremely common conditions, polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis. Furthermore, Ridley has talked about the toll that stress and exhaustion had on her following the release of The Force Awakens; by the time The Last Jedi debuted, her anxiety had gotten so bad that she had holes in her stomach wall. The stress took a toll.
By the time The Last Jedi opened, Ridley’s anxiety was severe with physical manifestations. She took a six-month sabbatical before filming The Rise of Skywalker, allowing her to regain balance with familiar London routines.
Practicing self-care became even more vital for Ridley after her Star Wars chapter closed. “After the last Star Wars came out and everything was quiet, I was like, ‘What the f*ck?’ I was grieving,” she recalls. Letting go of close relationships and time invested was emotionally intense. Then the world went into pandemic lockdown, leaving Ridley to process in stillness.
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Ridley believes her new film Sometimes I Think About Dying, which she made emerging from lockdown, gave her a way forward professionally and personally. “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I wanted to play Fran, but it was the entire film that touched me. We made it coming out of lockdown, and everyone was thrilled to be together; the message I feel it sends is that connection is more important than everything.“
Portraying the socially awkward Fran allowed Ridley to share her outlook on life after Star Wars fame. “We’re all fighting something that other people can’t see, and meeting people with kindness and grace and warmth is really the most any of us can do,” she says. “It’s really uncomfortable, being human. A lot of the time, it’s really f*cking hard. But to try is to succeed.”
For the intense Star Wars chapter that redefined her career, her perspective has developed. “It was my normal, but it was not normal to other people,” Ridley reflects. What grounded her was realizing, “I’m just a human being, separate from that.”
Ridley still feels early in her career, with an openness to explore different roles. “I’m really looking forward to what else might come up. I do feel like I’m at the beginning of my career,” she says. “I’m open to many different things.”
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