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Star Wars actor Daisy Ridley is on the cover of the December edition of City AM The Magazine. The Londoner on the challenges of living with Graves’ Disease, optimism and making her dream film with her husband, the screenwriter Tom Bateman
“I imagine life must be simpler if you really think you’re the shit,” says Daisy Ridley matter of factly. And yet, it’s safe to say the Star Wars actor does not consider herself “the shit.” For a woman who has become one of Britain’s most prized acting exports, she seems disarmingly without ego.
During our wide-spanning interview, the 32-year-old who went from Maida Vale to Tatooine answers questions with service-like efficiency, and nods like a tutor eliciting the correct answer from a pupil at suggestions she just doesn’t seem very famous. “There are times where I think, God, if I were 10 per cent more sure of myself, this would be easier! Living your life like that must be… amazing. I have too much self-doubt.”
She logs in seven minutes early to our Zoom, surely the first person in the history of time not to join the meeting a few seconds before. She’s relaxed about the delay – “I had a minute to change my washing over” – and is talking from her high-ceilinged period London home, often with a slightly puzzling Essexiness to her accent, especially when she tells me: “Thanks for ‘aving me!”
Daisy Ridley: ‘I was putting too much pressure on myself. The grace left me for a while’
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It is surely the charm that caught the attention of the Star Wars producers ten years ago, when she was hired while working a side job pulling pints in a London pub. Her agent landed Ridley an audition for Star Wars director JJ Abrams, who was looking for his Rey Skywalker, a human female Jedi fighting on the side of the Resistance. She landed the leading role, quite the promotion following a series of bit parts in TV dramas including Silent Witness, Casualty and Mr Selfridge.
Over the last decade she has shape-shifted with a series of indies that have harvested critical acclaim and suggested Ridley’s long term focus may be more earthbound than Star Wars. Mental health drama Sometimes I Think About Dying, released last year, is a masterstroke, an acute study of social isolation, the sort of thing that feels so relevant to our lives you watch it over and over again and take notes. In 2024’s low-budget Young Woman & The Sea, Ridley cemented her critical darling status, paying homage to Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to cross the channel. The last Star Wars entry was in 2019, though she’s returning with a Ray spin-off.
Her new film, Magpie, marks a bold new direction. It’s Ridley’s first turn working alongside actor-writer husband Tom Bateman, whom she met while working on Murder on the Orient Express. Magpie is a surprising and nuanced character study of a woman in a toxic relationship, but during the filming process Ridley became very unwell, and in August this year revealed her Graves’ Disease diagnosis to Women’s Health, an autoimmune condition that will require her to be on medication for life. It can cause a variety of symptoms, from memory loss to anxiety and palpitations.
Throughout our conversation Ridley becomes deeply introspective about seemingly trivial questions but can sink into a protective bubble of vagueness when we talk about the stresses of the past twelve months, both professionally and personally.
“Filming Magpie was probably a time where I was putting too much pressure on myself,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh I’m fine’. That’s where the grace left me for a little while.” She struggled to dial back her life to find the space she needed to tackle her condition and manage her mental health. She’s so tremendously excitable that it’s hard to imagine her slowing down; she’s so driven by future projects that she talks about them at a mile-a-minute. Her love for Bateman, whom she married quietly a year ago, makes her fizz.
But her zephyr has been challenged. Despite seeming upbeat, she mentions stress seven times, and says the disease can insidiously creep up on her. Watching Lilo & Stitch on a plane the other day helped her release some emotion: “It makes me cry anyway but I was probably crying more tears than just for Lilo & Stitch… I cry it out, give myself a little time to stress and then get back on the horse.”
Ridley on Star Wars Rey biopic: I don’t know how involved I’ll be as a producer, but it’s happening, it’s all good!
Her mother, a handful of brilliant friends, and Bateman, three years her senior, have been stabilising forces. Tabloids suggest Ridley is cagey when asked about her personal life, but she seems keen to talk about her husband. “It’s really good,” she says of their first year living and working together. “To the point where I said: ‘When Magpie’s out, what are we going to do next?!” It’s really been wonderful. We really share love of the movies and we tend to agree on what we like and even if we disagree I find it to be an interesting conversation. Tom and I made the film we wanted to make, which is really thrilling. It was always really… easy… I suppose.”
Bateman was filming in Los Angeles during the production of Magpie but they’d schedule calls at the end of the day when the time-zones lined up, and their smushy feelings for one another made the stressful (there’s that word again) parts feel easier. “No one wants to hear the ins and outs of a fifteen minute meeting, but when it’s your partner, they will listen!” When they’re done with meetings they “fill the stress with terrible TV, so when the stress is too much you switch on something hideous that you know you shouldn’t be watching. It’s helpful to do something that is totally away from the thing.”
“I’m such a fan of him as an actor and such a fan of his as a writer and he’s a fan of me. We honour each other. On set he was filming something else but I really felt like a custodian of something incredibly special.” Ridley came up with the initial seed idea for Magpie, though it changed in production. It was unusual for Bateman to turn someone else’s idea into a script, as he has “a pile” at home waiting to be made; conversely, Ridley says she “actually doesn’t have that many ideas.”
Can’t she rope Bateman in to pen her new Star Wars script? Ridley’s Ray spin-off is in what fans call ‘production purgatory’ after a string of creatives pulled out and there are fears the whole film may get scrapped. “That’s actually funny, I got a text from my friend the other day saying this… But I can categorically say that he’s not going to be involved. That would be hilarious. I mean that would be a story.” The script’s secrets are openly discussed in the Ridley-Bateman household. “He knows the whole story, it’s nice to share that. To be honest that’s something I haven’t really done before, I always took it incredibly seriously that I was not telling anyone, but now I feel he can know.”
She produced Magpie alongside three other projects; will she be involved behind the camera on Star Wars? “All of those conversations are positive and happening. Certainly in the producorial way I don’t know that I will be that involved, but what has been amazing was creatively Kathy [Kennedy, Star Wars producer] told me the idea for the story which is great and I’ve been over all of the developments, so I feel more consciously involved [than before] but I remember various things either JJ [Abrams] or Ryan [Johnson] told me, so I was always really made to feel involved. But on this one I’m aware of the route development. It’s also really nice to know that we have the time to do it right, and of course I’m really excited to film and I’m really excited to share developments with the world. It’s all good, it really is!”
Magpie with Daisy Ridley is available on digital platforms now
City AM The Magazine will be distributed from 5 December around central London Tube stations and in members’ clubs, airport lounges and train stations
