Daisy Ridley is the covergirl of GLAMOUR Magazine for the January Issue (2018). Find all pictures from the photoshoot in the gallery, and read the article below.
Daisy Ridley enters the tiny Montreal vegan sushi joint with a singsongy “Bonjour!”—she’s learning French while in town filming an adaptation of the dystopian YA trilogy Chaos Walking. So far she’s mastered key phrases necessary for a meal. A cheerful “excusez-moi” gets a grin from the young waiter leading us to our table.
Despite an affinity for Dior and custom-made Chloé on the red carpet, Ridley, 25, is currently wearing a nondescript black tank top and saggy gray jeans. With her dark hair scraped back into a bun and a wheely suitcase in tow, she looks more like Harried Commuter No. 1 than the brightest star in the Star Wars megagalaxy. Still, it takes only a moment for that same waiter to place her and begin clumsily futzing with the water glasses.
The parallels between the actress and her Star Wars character are almost comically—cosmically?—accurate. Like Jedi-in-training Rey, Ridley was plucked from obscurity (London, not a junkyard in Jakku) and thrust into a role of great responsibility: reenergizing one of the most beloved film series of all time while holding her own opposite veterans like Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill, who returns as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
And much like Rey, Ridley is in the process of figuring out what to do and who to be in a life that changed as quickly as the Millennium Falcon jumps into hyperspace. “Yes,” she agrees with the tidy comparison, “except I don’t have talents”—she pauses to consider her words—“or rather, I’m not Force-sensitive.” Her current list of projects suggests otherwise: She recently starred in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and her post-Rey arc includes everything from the lead in the film Ophelia to a voice-over in Will Gluck’s star-studded Peter Rabbit. She may not be fully Jedi-trained, but the girl has serious talent.
Prestige gigs notwithstanding, Ridley also finds herself at the delicate center of a fierce fandom. In Rey, girls and young women finally have a Star Wars heroine in a role previously reserved for men: the one destined to protect the galaxy. Rey is a light-saber-wielding Jedi who saves the day (and John Boyega’s Finn) herself. And Ridley, too, is a new kind of female celebrity, one who stands at the forefront of a multibillion-dollar franchise and feels confident enough to insist to a room full of Disney executives that Rey dolls aren’t just for girls. (More on that later.)
Of course, not all of being Rey—or famous—has come easy. Remember the wheely suitcase? She’s headed home to London for downtime that serves as an antacid to the surging stress of her Hollywood life. “I had problems with my gut last year,” she admits. “I was so stressed, my gut wall literally had holes in it.” But it wasn’t the meetings with executives, the screaming fans, or the endless photo ops that did it. “It was what everybody kept saying to me: ‘Your life is going to change. Are you ready?’” she says. “I was like, ‘How can I be ready? I don’t know what’s coming.’”
Here’s what she hopes is coming in 2018 and beyond: working alongside her heroes Emma Thompson, Wes Anderson, and/or Meryl Streep; getting her degree—she took her first online class in social sciences last year and will resume in January; and maybe having “some kiddies,” she says. But first: eight vegan sushi rolls, plum wine (her idea), and an honest chat about how she’s adjusting to life as Daisy Ridley, the girl from Star Wars. That seems like a good place to start.