Playing Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens took Daisy Ridley from being a complete unknown to a household name pretty much overnight. Like Mark Hamill and Hayden Christensen before her, the franchise put the actress on the map.
However, playing the lead in a Star Wars movie doesn't come without its fair share of challenges and Inverse (via SFFGazette.com) recently caught up with Ridley and pointed out that it's been a decade since she was first cast.
Looking back at the process, Ridley revealed that filmmaker J.J. Abrams had some important advice for her. "'Understand the scale,'" she remembers him saying. "'This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on a level that is inconceivable.'"
"When all of the craziness was going on," she adds, "I was like, 'I’m good. I’m good. I’m coping fine. Everything’s fine.' And I was fine, for the most part. But I think what I was really grappling with was that it was my normal, but it was not normal to other people."
"For friends and family, or any people who see something in a slightly different way than you do, there’s this projection of you, and you in that world, and how it feels to do this and that," Ridley continues. "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."
In the past, Ridley has talked openly about dealing with endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome, with both conditions causing her problems during production on The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. She was given six months off before The Rise of Skywalker and when work on that movie was finished, the actress admits to finding herself at something of a loss.
"After the last Star Wars came out and everything was quiet, I was like, 'What the f*ck?'" Ridley recalls. "I was grieving." Then, COVID came along and "having to sit and just be still in lockdown was incredibly helpful, in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I realized there was a lot that I hadn’t processed properly."
Now, Ridley is gearing up to begin work on a new Star Wars movie set 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker. Ms. Marvel director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy will be at the helm and, as noted, Ridley will reprise her role as Rey, now a Jedi Master looking to create a new Jedi Order while attempting to combat the dark forces that rise up to stop her.
According to the actress, she anticipates beginning work on that "sometime in the near future." Lucasfilm has not announced a release date for the movie.