Daisy Ridley

She was pouring drinks at two different London pubs when J.J. Abrams spent seven months looking for an unknown to carry one of the biggest franchises in the world. Ridley had a handful of minor TV credits and the kind of persistence that usually looks like delusion, emailing her agent twice just to get in the room. The audition tape for Star Wars: The Force Awakens made the rounds because you could see exactly why she got the part: she went from terrified to furious on command, multiple times, while Abrams gave her notes. She won Best Breakthrough Performance at the 2016 MTV Movie Awards, which understated it.

The Rise of Skywalker wrapped her trilogy in 2019 and the post-franchise problem opened immediately. Chaos Walking (2021) answered it badly, bombing after a troubled production that pushed the film back years. Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) reset the narrative at Sundance, a spare indie where she played a woman who couldn't connect to anyone, and the industry noticed she could do more than swing a lightsaber. She has a full slate: We Bury the Dead opened in early 2026, The Good Samaritan shoots later that year, and she's signed onto Paramount's Ebenezer opposite Johnny Depp. She didn't walk away from Star Wars. Star Wars is the thing she's trying to walk away from.

She trained at Tring Park School for Performing Arts, a Hertfordshire conservatoire that mostly produces stage actors, not franchise leads. In 2024 she disclosed a Graves' disease diagnosis, an autoimmune thyroid condition she'd been managing since 2023 after initially mistaking the symptoms for stress from a difficult film role. She'd had endometriosis since her teens and disclosed that along with polycystic ovaries in 2016. The medical list is long for someone still in her early thirties.