Daisy Ridley on the Star Wars backlash: ‘I literally couldn’t sleep’
It was after shooting her new film Magpie that Daisy Ridley began feeling terrible. The 32-year-old British actress who experienced a near vertical rise to fame when she won a starring role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens a decade ago was “shattered” when the film wrapped, she tells me. It had been a heavy load: she was producing as well as starring in it, and her husband, the actor Tom Bateman, had written the screenplay. She had put so much into making it happen that Bateman said she had “willed it into existence”.
She was experiencing some dramatic symptoms, though – weight loss, fatigue, hand tremors and a racing heart rate – but still she hadn’t realised that she was “actually very poorly… I just thought, I’ve made a film, it takes so much energy out of you, of course, you’d be tired. And it wasn’t until a few months later where I thought, blimey, is this still Magpie hanging around?”
She finally visited her GP, who diagnosed her with the autoimmune condition Graves’ disease, which can cause an overactive thyroid. She describes the absolute relief of her diagnosis. “I almost started crying when I went in for my bloods and saw this wonderful doctor. I was really emotional because [there is] an internalised thing of you don’t want to look hysterical, you don’t want to look dramatic, you don’t want to look like you can’t handle what’s going on in your life,” she says. “I think we just are all so aware of this feeling that women should handle ourselves, and we should be able to put up with the strains and the stresses of this incredibly stressful world that we all live in.”
This, she believes “led me to not take it as seriously, as I should have earlier”. After finally being told what it was, she says, “the medication is fantastic, and everything’s working well.” She notes an interview with the comedian Miranda Hart, in which she talked about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome caused by Lyme disease, which she had suffered for years before being properly diagnosed. “Oh my god, that is just awful, what she went through,” Ridley says. “And certainly I never had that. But there is the thing of, why are so many women so poorly? And that is something we all have to get to the bottom of.”
She’d experienced something similar after playing the real life Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, in Disney’s Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Young Woman and the Sea (2024). “I couldn’t lie on my left ear. I was in so much pain.” There were various attempts to diagnose it as an ear infection, she says, but afterwards, “I was like, I still don’t feel right. And I went to an ENT [doctor], who said I had osteomas [benign bone growth], when your ear canal shrinks. I remember calling my mom and going, ‘I’m not crazy!’”
She’s in New York, but just about to fly home after a month-long publicity tour around America. She’s tired but buoyant, talking a mile a minute. She’s leaving in a few hours and may even get to spend one day catching up on her sleep before it all starts again – she’s screening Magpie on Friday November 1 at FrightFest in London.
She had the initial idea for it while shooting The Marsh King’s Daughter (2023) in Canada during Covid. “I had a little girl in the film, and she was so amazing.” On a plane, she had a flash of inspiration for a story about an actress who loves her on-screen child so much that she tries to infiltrate the girl’s family. When she told Bateman about it, he zeroed in on another question – who is the woman at home?
And so, Magpie began to take shape. Ridley plays child actor Tilly’s mother, Anette, who has moved to a house in the country with her novelist husband, Ben (Shazad Latif), and their daughter and baby. “It’s a gilded cage,” Ridley says. “They live in a beautiful home. But she is so trapped.” The relationship, with its physical and social isolation, feels uncomfortably real. “We have had to assure people that our relationship is fine,” Ridley says. “But I think most people have either been in that relationship, or they’ve been at a table at dinner or at lunch where someone says something to their partner, and it passes by so quickly, you’re struggling to understand if the way you heard it is actually what was meant, and you don’t get involved because it’s not your relationship.”
Things take an even darker turn when Ben becomes infatuated with the actress playing Tilly’s mother (Matilda Lutz, so brilliant in Revenge in 2017). The film subtly shifts gear, as Ridley’s Anette begins to access her suppressed anger.
It’s a big achievement for the star after an amazing 10 years that began with her badgering her agent that she had a “really weird feeling” that she needed to audition for the part of the Jedi warrior Rey. Winning the role lifted her into a realm few can imagine, making her the focus of a fanbase like no other. “I mean, of course, there are moments that are a bit alarming. I went to a screening of Magpie the other night, and people were following the car, but they aren’t Star Wars fans. They’re autograph hunters, and so I don’t put those two things together. And outside of that, people, I would say, are incredibly respectful.”
She faced a backlash, though, after a 2019 Guardian interview portrayed her as defensive about her “privilege”, suggesting that she saw little difference between her experience and that of her co-star John Boyega. “I literally couldn’t sleep after that came out,” she says, “because I felt like, honestly, it was a purposeful de-contextualising. I was reading it thinking, ‘that’s not what I meant, that’s not what I meant.’ It was incredibly upsetting, and it’s interesting when you’ve spoken about something 100 times, and then just the lens changes slightly of how that’s viewed. I had always spoken about John and I’d always spoken about the two of us together, so that was really weird.”
She grew up in leafy north London, the daughter of a rock photographer and a mother who worked in a bank. (Contrary to reports, Dad’s Army’s Arnold Ridley, who played Private Godfrey, was not her great uncle but a distant cousin.) Like Lily James and Jessica Brown Findlay, Ridley is a product of Tring Park Performing Arts School in Hertfordshire, where she boarded on a scholarship. Such schools may have had a mixed press in recent years, but for Ridley it was a joy. “I loved that half the day we were doing performing arts. And then, because I am quite studious too, I was also able to do four A-levels. For me, it did feel, honestly, like being at Hogwarts, because I love Harry Potter. It was quite magical.”
She’s returning to Star Wars as Rey – “sooner than I thought” – in a new film, her fourth, that takes place after the sequel trilogy that ended with The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. When news broke last week that Peaky Blinders’ screenwriter Steven Knight has left the project, there were soon rumblings that the film could join a growing list of Star Wars projects that have been abandoned by Disney.
Will Ridley stay the course if it gets trapped in development hell? “I mean, there are, of course, 100 things at play that are not out there in the public domain, but certainly what is going on is very good,” she says. “I can’t see it being an extended period of development. But what is amazing is having the benefit of making sure the story is right and making sure that people are going to be happy, that the wait was worth it.”
Since The Rise of Skywalker, she has been diversifying radically. After the big-budget sci-fi flop Chaos Walking (2021), Ridley has found a sweet spot in actorly films such as the destined for cult status Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) and the upcoming zombie film We Bury the Dead, shot in Australia, which she describes as a “beautiful mishmash” – part meditation on grief and part road movie, too. She’s a big fan of zombie movies, though. “I was like, my zombie film! I can’t wait for [Danny Boyle’s] 28 Years Later and I love Shaun of the Dead.”
Magpie was shot by the award-winning theatre director Sam Yates, who has been talking to her about going on stage. She came close to taking on a play this year, describing her rapid passage from “No, I’m too scared” to being unable to sleep from excitement, but her schedule ultimately got in the way. It’s on her radar, though. She’s about to take some time off, during which she might even go to see her Madame Tussauds waxwork (“they sent me the pictures, I remember thinking, bloody hell, that does look like me”). Ridley, though, is a down-to-earth star who still likes to get the bus and the tube. “This might sound ridiculous,” she says, “but I really don’t see myself as famous.”
Magpie is available on UK and Ireland digital platforms 11 November