Daisy Ridley remembers how J.J. Abrams advised her on dealing with the fans after she was cast as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
“Understand the scale. This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on a level that is inconceivable,” Ridley said in an interview with Inverse while promoting her latest movie, Sometimes I Think About Dying.
Ridley continued by explaining how she managed her newfound celebrity status while working on the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the mix of fan reactions online to the Rey character. “When all of the craziness was going on . . . 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.”
Ridley added, “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 . . . 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.”
Daisy Ridley’s Star Wars future
Ridley is set to reprise her role as Rey for a new Star Wars movie that sees the Jedi Master rebuilding a new Jedi Order following the events of 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy will direct the new project with a screenplay by Steven Knight that Ridley teases will take the franchise in a new direction.
“So I thought about it for a little bit, and once I knew what the story was and everything, I knew it was something I really wanted to do,” Ridley said to AlloCiné (via Deadline). “I think it’s a really fantastic exploration of the Star Wars world. It’s a really cool way of taking the story on in a bit of a different direction.”
