Daisy Ridley, Actress – Beyond Star Wars

Daisy Jazz Isobel Ridley rose to prominence as Jedi warrior Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and its sequels, but since then she’s been charting a course well away from the light saber. She’s been a regular in critically acclaimed TV series (Younger, Silent Witness, Mr Selfridge), won a Best Actress BAFTA for 2022 film Chaos Walking and performed voiceover duties in the James McAvoy/Willem Dafoe thriller Twelve Minutes. She’s also been in a handful of movies including romcom Sometimes I Think About Dying and Young Woman and the Sea, about Olympic swimmer Gerturde Ederle, who became the first female to swim across the English Channel.

She’s currently starring in Magpie, a contemporary noir thriller written by her husband Tom Bateman and directed by Sam Yates. It’s a far cry from the saga world and finds her playing Fran, a woman who spends much of her life at her desk data entry job in a quaint coastal office. She’s guarded and dismissive of her chatty coworkers, but a romance with a new colleague challenges her to take risks in order to connect.

Outside of work, the actress has continued to focus on her health. She suffered from endometriosis and polycystic ovaries in her teens, and she’s been open about her struggles with Graves disease, an autoimmune disorder related to overactivity of the thyroid. She told Women’s Health that going gluten-free and other lifestyle changes helped her manage the symptoms.