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What sort of actor is Daisy Ridley? Four words might cover it. “I’m not an arsehole!” says the 33-year-old Star Wars alum, in that buoyant, unassuming voice that makes you instantly believe her. “That seems like a funny thing to say, but over time, you realise people [in show business] behave really badly. I’m hardworking; I turn up on time; I know my lines; I know where I need to be.” She pauses. “But in a sort of metaphysical way? I don’t know…”
It’s been over a decade now since Ridley was cast as the lead in 2015’s Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, once the third-biggest film of all time. Flanked by John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver, Ridley was the face of Disney’s sequel trilogy, playing the Luke Skywalker-esque Jedi prodigy plucked from sandy anonymity to save the galaxy. From this success came other blockbusters – the Agatha Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express (2017), the YA sci-fi Chaos Walking (2021), opposite Tom Holland – as well as more cerebral indie fare.
It’s easy to forget – in the woozy afterglow of two polarising Star Wars sequels, and the wildly inconsistent franchise sprawl that followed for the series – just how much Ridley popped when she made her big-screen debut. Then a near-total unknown in her early twenties, Ridley held her own alongside established stars such as Driver and Isaac; critics and dyed-in-the-wool Star Wars fanatics poured praise on the film, but particularly its young star. Rarely does a new actor engender such immediate enthusiasm – I suppose you would call it charm. I’m reminded of this feeling as Ridley barrels into our video call today, her Zoom account bearing the name Tom Bateman (a British actor, and Ridley’s husband). “I’m so sorry, I cannot change my bloody name on this!” she says, with a sort of sunny bluster. “How incredibly unprofessional. I’m me, for God’s sake.”
Dressed casually and eating determinedly from a bowl of rice, Ridley sits beneath a large image of her own face. It’s the poster for 2024’s Magpie – written by Bateman – in which Ridley plays the mother of a child actor who starts to suspect her husband is having a fling with one of the kid’s co-stars. “That relationship in Magpie literally couldn’t be further from where me and Tom are,” she laughs. “But it’s interesting, we both know people involved in a situation like this, people who have been very hurt by infidelity, who have fabricated things to try and investigate what’s going on.” I tell her how much I liked the film. “Thank you,” she says. “You sound so surprised!”
It’s to Ridley’s great credit that she still has the element of surprise on her side. It was maybe her great asset with Star Wars, of course. But the brilliant Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) – in which Ridley portrayed an insular (and probably neurodivergent) loner in small-town America – was another delightful revelation, with Ridley showcasing her aptitude for versatile character work. What next? Another hard pivot to the world of gritty, Jason Statham-style thrillers? Well… yes.
In Cleaner, out next week, Ridley is a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the only recourse is violence. Set almost entirely within a London skyscraper – or dangling around the outside of it – the up-tempo thriller sees Ridley play an army-trained window cleaner who has to save her autistic brother from a group of eco-terrorists who’ve taken control of the building.
I don’t think I’ve been pigeonholed. Honestly, I think Star Wars has given me choices. It’s why I have the career I have
If the name “John McClane” is ringing in your ears, you’re not the only one. Ridley has taken to referring to the film as “Dry Shard”, an allusion to the London skyscraper that was its originally intended setting. (I’m not certain what the “dry” part alludes to.) “Of course I felt the Die Hard comparisons,” Ridley says, “but ultimately it’s a different story. For one thing, this is a person trying to fight their way in.” The character of her brother also adds another dimension, she adds. “It’s a kind of specific relationship in a way that you sometimes don’t get in films like that. “I really wanted to honour all of the nuances.”
To prepare, Ridley binged all the recent women-led action movies she could get her hands on: Atomic Blonde, Hanna, the Korean action flick Ballerina among them. “Of course, there’s not as much of it,” Ridley says. “It’s like 5 per cent of the male action out there.” The fighting, particularly towards the end of Cleaner, is crunchy and frenetic; the high point of the film is an indelibly tactile scrap between Ridley’s character and an enemy goon – “full aggression, no holds barred”, she says. “It’s funny: I’ve done a lot of action movies, but this felt like the first action movie I’ve done.”
At a glance, Ridley doesn’t really seem like the obvious choice to head up material like Cleaner – though really, a spry woman in her early thirties ought to be an infinitely more credible foe for terrorists than, say, a seventysomething Liam Neeson. In classic stunt-movie style – Ridley at one point mentions Michelle Yeoh’s famous story of death-defying injury on the set of Supercop – Cleaner didn’t skimp on the physical demands. “Good God, my body,” she exclaims. “I was battered and bruised: I still have a scar on my arm; I wrenched my shoulder; I bruised my bone so badly I thought I broke it.”
You might assume that a smorgasbord of aches and pains isn’t exactly what Ridley had in mind during her teenage years. The daughter of a photographer and a communications professional, Ridley entered a school for the performing arts at the age of nine, having gained entry on a scholarship. (Go a little further up Ridley’s family tree and you’ll find Dad’s Army star and playwright Arnold Ridley and John Harry Dunn Ridley OBE, erstwhile head of engineering at the BBC.) She attended Birkbeck, University of London, but dropped out partway through to pursue an acting career in earnest.
Early roles were scattershot while she worked in bars to get by: fans of Matt Berry’s surreal cult comedy Toast of London may have spotted the future Jedi in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo, playing a stagehand. “I hold a trident,” she grins. “I was so thrilled – I love that show so much.” Oftentimes, today and in general, Ridley can come across as sweetly earnest; it seems almost strange to picture her watching something as eccentric and mocking as Toast. Perhaps this attests to a side of herself she likes to keep more private.
“When the first auditions for The Force Awakens were held, in November 2013, it seemed like every young female actor under the sun threw their hat in the ring for Rey (given, at that stage, the rather more prosaic name “Rachel”). Actors such as Elizabeth Olsen, Lupita Nyong’o, and Saoirse Ronan were reportedly among the thousands in contention; some, such as Glass Onion’s Jessica Henwick, made it through six months of auditions before losing out to Ridley at the final hurdle. Ultimately, though, it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing quite the same job.
Rey, for her part, is a deceptively tricky role to pull off: part ingenue, part gladiator, with just a hint of feralness, as if raised by a pack of wolves with a particularly sophisticated moral code. “Force Awakens was such a physical thing to have to prepare for, and I mean, going on to a film for the first time anyway, I didn’t have any idea what that would look like,” Ridley says. She has spoken in recent years of the toll that Star Wars took on her health, including stomach ulcers induced by stress. “I don’t think it was Star Wars itself that caused stress,” she clarifies. “It was being a 20-year-old who was cast in something that a lot of people watch – suddenly standing in a spotlight.”
That spotlight’s wattage would only increase as the franchise moved on to its second entry: 2017’s Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, an outstanding and consummately made sci-fi blockbuster that split the Star Wars fanbase down the middle, and became ground zero for a never-ending wave of infernal pop culture discourse. Rian Johnson, the film’s director, was vilified by sections of the fanbase; a trilogy of further Star Wars films he had signed on to direct has quietly de-materialised.
On the furore, Ridley is diplomatic. “Being an actor, you are at the behest of the person telling the story,” she says. “It’s their version of the story. Of course you want everyone to be happy, and to feel like their feelings have been taken into account. But also, when the people who are making the film love the film so much, it’s only coming from a good place.
“There is room for a lot of opinions – and that’s not a bad thing,” she adds, carefully. “It’s weird, because people talk so much about this ‘discourse’. However, being in a convention centre with real Star Wars fans, you’ve never felt people who were more together with their love for this world.”
A little inevitably, the next few years involved some professional feet-finding for Ridley, particularly when The Rise of Skywalker (2019) was met with muted disappointment. For a moment, it seemed as if Chaos Walking could be the start of something promising: an adaptation of a bestselling teen sci-fi novel, which paired Ridley with one of Hollywood’s most popular young male leads in Tom Holland. They were cast in mid-2016; a full five years (and substantial reshoots) would pass before the film saw the light of day.
When Chaos Walking did arrive, it was in the thick of the pandemic. “The world was in the most intensely awful place at that time,” she recalls. “I don’t really think of it in a negative way, I suppose, because real life was much more important for us. People were literally fighting for their lives.”
And besides, she adds, it’s not as if there’s too much long-term strategising when it comes to her career. “I’ve always felt very OK with my yeses and my nos,” she says. “There were a couple of things that I wasn’t able to do, and they turned out to be massively successful, and I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ But what are you going to do? The minute someone takes on a role, that’s their experience.”
We know of at least one big recent yes, a project floating over Ridley’s horizon like one of Tatooine’s twin suns: in 2023, it was announced that she will return as Rey in a new Star Wars sequel. (That film, like most of the franchise’s in-development projects, remains in ironclad secrecy.) “Time has not changed how I feel [about Star Wars],” she says. “If I didn’t feel excited by the story, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
But what about that famous curse, I ask? Star Wars has become known for derailing as many careers as it’s fostered: from Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher to prequel stars Hayden Christensen and Ahmed Best, actors have often struggled to escape from the all-consuming association with George Lucas’s sci-fi phenomenon. “I don’t think I’ve been pigeonholed,” Ridley says, swallowing the last few forkfuls of lunch. “Honestly, I think Star Wars has given me choices. It’s why I have the career I have.
“The fact is, all actors are mainly known for one thing – even if you’ve done 100 others. I was listening to a podcast with Robert De Niro, and it’s always gonna be the Scorsese films he’s remembered for. And he’s done 300-odd things!” No matter how many more projects like Cleaner emerge, for Ridley, that “one thing” is, was, and probably always shall be Star Wars. And she’s got absolutely no problem with it.
‘Cleaner’ is on Sky Cinema from 2 May
English (US) ·