Daisy Ridley struggled with the “craziness” of shooting her ‘Star Wars’ films – which left her with stomach ulcers.
Daisy Ridley struggled with the ‘craziness’ of shooting her ‘Star Wars’ films – which left her with stomach ulcers
The actress, 31, played heroine Rey in the trilogy ‘The Force Awakens’, ‘The Last Jedi’ and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’, and has previously admitted it took such a toll on her mental health that by the second installment she was suffering holes in her gut.
She has now told Inverse magazine: “When all of the craziness was going on, I was like, ‘I’m good. I’m good. I’m coping fine. Everything’s fine.’
“And I was fine, for the most part. But I think what I was really grappling with was that it was my normal, but it was not normal to other people.”
Daisy added about how she fought a feeling of isolation while shooting her ‘Star Wars’ trilogy: “For friends and family, or any people who see something in a slightly different way than you do, there’s this projection of you, and you in that world, and how it feels to do this and that.
“And you’re like, ‘Well, actually, I’m just a human being, separate from that.’ It’s quite this wrestle, of the reality and the fantasy that’s often projected onto you.”
Daisy has been open in the past about living with endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome and skin problems she’s experienced.
She has added to Inverse that ahead of the release of her first ‘Star Wars’ film in 2015, director J J Abrams, 57, let her know she must “understand the scale” of the part she was taking on.
She said the filmmaker told her: “This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on a level that is inconceivable.”
Along with the stress she felt while starring in ‘Star Wars’, the actress told Inverse she was thrust into delving into her feelings during Covid.
Daisy recalled “having to sit and just be still in lockdown was incredibly helpful, in a way I hadn’t anticipated”.
She added: “I realised there was a lot that I hadn’t processed properly,” she reflected.
Tagged in Daisy Ridley