Daisy Ridley says she wasn't getting much work right after finishing Star Wars
Jonathan Olley/© 2019 Lucasfilm Ltd.
One would presume that Daisy Ridley, the face of a multi-billion-dollar global blockbuster franchise, would be swimming in job offers following the culmination of the latest Star Wars trilogy with The Rise of Skywalker. (This was also before the COVID-19 pandemic that halted Hollywood, by the way.) That, the actress says, was not the case.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly about her voice role in the time-loop video game Twelve Minutes, Ridley looks back on her mindset after wrapping the cinematic saga of Rey and how there was a slight panic mode when "nothing was coming through" job-wise in those first couple months after Rise of Skywalker hit theaters in December 2019.
"It was so sad to finish [Star Wars]," she says over Zoom from London. "When the film was released, I was like, 'Oh my God.' It was such a huge chapter. And, weirdly, the past few months of not having much… Obviously now it’s really nice to be working, but not having much [at the time] I feel like I processed the last five years. To be forced to slow down, it was good mentally for me because [Star Wars was] a big thing in my life."
"Weirdly, at the beginning of the year nothing was coming through," she continues. "I was like, 'Aww! No one wants to employ me.'" Ridley later remarks how "there were actually loads of things that I auditioned for at the beginning of the year and didn’t get any of them."
"I had that moment of 'Oh my god!' and then just thought 'everything in its right time,'" she says.
By the end of February, early March, "things started picking up." It was around that time she got a call about Twelve Minutes.
Ridley voices a woman living with her husband, who's stuck in a time loop, in the Xbox and PC game Twelve Minutes, to be published by Annapurna's video game division. With both characters unnamed (it's part of the mystery), this man, voiced by It Chapter Two's James McAvoy, witnesses a gun-touting stranger (The Lighthouse's Willem Dafoe) burst into his apartment and attack his wife for some past grievance. The man is then forced to relive the past 12 minutes over and over again until he can figure out the mystery surrounding this event and, hopefully, stop it from happening altogether.
Ridley now has a few other voice parts on her plate, including Baba Yaga, an animated interactive film for the virtual-reality Oculus Quest platform that features Jennifer Hudson, Kate Winslet, and Glenn Close. Ridley will also lend her talents to an original Audible series, Islanders, from playwright Elinor Cook.
Scripts for other potential projects have come across her way during London's pandemic-prompted quarantine. "There have been awesome things," Ridley says, "and obviously no one knows when they’re gonna go." Certain projects, like Jurassic World: Dominion and The Girlfriend Experience season 3, are currently filming in the U.K. with added safety measures, but that's not the norm for most productions at the moment.
"There’s one thing that I'm gonna do that’s super f—ing dark," she teases. "I was like, 'Do we need something this dark?' But it’s also really interesting and about memory and everything’s a bit fragmented. I definitely feel like what I wanna watch and I guess be part of is something with some joy. That's what people need."
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