Daisy Ridley Reveals She Was Totally Rejected Because Of Star Wars Sequels
Daisy Ridley says she felt unemployable after the release of The Rise of Skywalker.
Daisy Ridley says that she was essentially unemployable immediately following the release of the final to-date Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, in 2019, implicitly because of her part in the colossally successful but controversial trilogy of films. According to Entertainment Weekly, the British actress was rejected by multiple jobs, saying “there were actually loads of things that I auditioned for at the beginning of the year and didn’t get any of them” and that she thought “Aww! No one wants to employ me.”
Sadly, Daisy Ridley’s experience in having difficulty finding work post-Star Wars is far more common than not. Of the original central trio of the first Star Wars trilogy, only Harrison Ford saw immediate success after the movies, first overlapping with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and then in a series of acclaimed dramatic roles, including his sole Academy Award nomination for Witness. Later, Ford would become one of the most popular and highest-paid actors of the 1990s, with roles in hit movies like Air Force One and The Fugitive.
Meanwhile, both Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher’s experiences paralleled Daisy Ridley’s for years. Fisher struggled to find acting roles and began a lucrative career as a screenwriter and uncredited script doctor, as well as publishing a semi-autobiographical novel that was eventually turned into a feature film starring Meryl Streep.
For his part, Mark Hamill was typecast by his work in Star Wars and transitioned to theater and voice work; he portrayed 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in an acclaimed theatrical production of Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, only to be told that the film adaptation would not cast him. According to Hamill, Amadeus director Milos Forman directly told him “You must not to be playing the Mozart because the people not believing that the Luke Spacewalker was the Mozart.” Of course, now everyone knows that he can be anything from a Spacewalker to the Joker.
So Daisy Ridley can at least take some comfort in that she is not the only actor to go from the intense rigors and fame of Star Wars to a decided lack of opportunities. However, things seemed to have turned around for Daisy Ridley, who currently has five different film projects in various states of production or development (per IMDb). Her most immediate project is a romantic drama titled Sometimes I Think About Dying, which sounds about as far away from Star Wars as one can imagine.
Despite the impact on her career, Daisy Ridley does not seem particularly interested in disavowing the franchise, like her former co-star John Boyega or ignoring its existence entirely like Adam Driver. Ridley’s character Rey was one of the few major characters left standing at the end of the sequel trilogy, so there is always the possibility that she could pop up again in one of the many series in development. However, given that Lucasfilm seems to be focusing its Disney+ series on events prior to the sequel trilogy (sometimes very prior, as in The Acolyte), it might be a while before we see Rey again.
