Daisy Ridley, the Jedi who keeps choosing the smaller film

Daisy Ridley

Photo: Our Movie Guide / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 10, 1992 Westminster, London, England
Occupation	Actress and producer
Known for	Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Murder on the Orient Express
Awards	2 Empire Award · MTV Movie

Two careers run under Daisy Ridley’s name, and they barely touch. In one she is Rey, the scavenger from Jakku who closed the Skywalker saga by taking the family name for herself, a character Lucasfilm has held in reserve ever since and, according to reports this autumn, wants back at the centre of a new trilogy. In the other she is a producer and lead in small, stubborn films about loneliness, grief and endurance, most of which the box office walked straight past. What makes her worth following is that she keeps choosing the second while the first waits for her.

She is the youngest daughter of the photographer Chris Ridley and Louise Fawkner-Corbett, who worked in banking, and the great-niece of Arnold Ridley, the actor and playwright who wrote the stage thriller The Ghost Train and played Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army. A scholarship took her to Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in Hertfordshire when she was nine, and she stayed until she was eighteen. A course in classical civilisation at Birkbeck, University of London, did not hold her.

Born in Westminster on 10 April 1992, she spent her early twenties collecting the credits a young London actor collects: episodes of Casualty, Silent Witness and Mr Selfridge, a turn in the comedy Toast of London, and a part in The Inbetweeners 2 that ended up on the cutting-room floor. By the time the low-budget Scrawl, her first feature, reached a screen, Lucasfilm had already announced her in April 2014 as the unknown lead of J. J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

That film opened in December 2015 and took more than $2 billion worldwide, the biggest release of its year, and it rested on a newcomer holding the frame opposite Harrison Ford and John Boyega. Ridley won the Empire Award for Best Female Newcomer and the MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. She returned for Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017, which brought her the Empire Award for Best Actress, and closed the trilogy with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. Between the space operas she played Mary Debenham in Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express, where she met the actor Tom Bateman, gave Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend her own story in Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia, and voiced Cottontail in Peter Rabbit.

The franchise was not gentle with her. From the first film a vocal part of the fandom dismissed Rey as a character who was good at everything too quickly, and the final instalment’s revelation that she was Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter divided the audience that had embraced her precisely because she came from nowhere. After a post against gun violence in 2016 drew a wave of abuse, Ridley deleted her Instagram account and stayed away for six years. Since then a second story has hardened around her in the trade press: the Star Wars star whose films flop. Chaos Walking, Doug Liman’s science-fiction adventure with Tom Holland, went through reshoots and a long delay before disappearing in 2021; Cleaner, Martin Campbell’s hostage thriller, grossed about $1.3 million in cinemas in 2025 against a reported $25 million budget. That reading is too neat. It ignores that she has been choosing these projects, often as producer, and that Cleaner went on to top the streaming chart on Max. The harder truth is that none of the post-Rey films has yet given her a second role the public attaches to her name, and every year without one makes the return to the Jedi look less like a choice and more like the default.

The producing work is where her taste is clearest. Sometimes I Think About Dying, directed by Rachel Lambert and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, gave her Fran, an office worker who retreats so far into her own head that a colleague’s small kindness registers as an event; it was her first credit as a producer. Magpie, directed by Sam Yates in 2024, grew from an idea she took to Bateman, who wrote the screenplay, and cast her opposite Shazad Latif as a wife who discovers how little space her marriage leaves her. For Joachim Rønning’s Young Woman and the Sea, also in 2024, she played Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, and shot the swimming scenes in open water; Disney moved it from streaming to a limited cinema run after strong test screenings, and it made little money.

Her most recent lead arrived in American cinemas on 2 January 2026. In Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead she plays Ava, a volunteer on a body-retrieval team in Tasmania after an accidental American military strike has wiped out most of the island’s population, searching the quarantine zone for a husband who was there when it happened. Critics were split on the film’s middle stretch and largely agreed on her: a zombie film that works mainly as a study of grief, carried by a performance that refuses to hurry it.

Ridley and Bateman confirmed they had married during the Sundance festival in January 2023. She has spoken publicly about being diagnosed with endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome at fifteen, and in 2023 about a diagnosis of Graves’ disease, which left her with a racing heart rate, weight loss and fatigue.

The next stretch is already mapped. On 13 November 2026 Paramount releases Ti West’s Ebenezer in the United Kingdom and the United States, a dark take on Dickens with Johnny Depp as Scrooge and Ridley in an ensemble that includes Rupert Grint, Andrea Riseborough and Ian McKellen. The Last Resort, a romantic comedy directed by Donald Petrie and shot in the Philippines with Alden Ehrenreich, is due in 2027, and Pierre Morel’s action thriller The Good Samaritan has her as a doctor caught in a conspiracy after she and her husband, played by Lucien Laviscount, rescue a wounded man at sea. Rey is the open file. The film announced in 2023 with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directing still has no release date, and at the end of September 2026 Deadline reported that Lucasfilm had lined up Jon Watts to direct the first film of a Simon Kinberg-written trilogy continuing the Skywalker saga, with Ridley expected back; Disney has not greenlit it and Lucasfilm has not commented. If it happens, she will walk back into the biggest room in cinema having spent a decade proving she prefers the small ones.

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Tags: actors, actresses, British cinema, Tom Bateman, Daisy Ridley, J. J. Abrams

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