Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley Does Not Care for The Last Jedi ’s Breakout Character

Everybody loves porgs, the lovely furry Star Wars birds who flew around adorably in The Last Jedi! [Five seconds later] We regret to inform you that Daisy Ridley does not care for the little guys. Oh well, at least porgs aren’t racists.

Ridley, who plays Rey in the new Star Wars trilogy, appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday to promote Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which comes out in under a month. During the interview, Fallon asked the 27-year-old actress whether she preferred porgs or the latest cute Star Wars icon, The Mandalorian’s Baby Yoda. Ridley did not hesitate for a moment when she answered.

“Baby Yoda,” she said, throwing her cute Episode VIII co-stars under the bus much in the same way that Chewbacca tossed the charred, uneaten corpse of a porg over his shoulder.

“Look, I’m not a big fan of the porgs,” she continued. “We worked for six months on The Last Jedi, and in every interview [we were asked], ‘What about the porgs?’ I was like, ‘The porgs were there for a day! I was there every day for six months! We worked hard.’ ”

Ridley isn’t the only Last Jedi star who doesn’t get the collective porg-asm Star Wars fans had over the little critters. John Boyega came out as anti-porg on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2017. “I just naturally don’t like ’em,” Boyega explained. “They have the puppets blinking and all that kind of stuff. I’m not into it.”

For what it's worth, Ridley was also on Kimmel that night, and she didn't say anything bad about porgs then.

Boyega might not care for the uncanny valley nature of the porg puppets, and Ridley appears to have been understandably jealous of all the attention they were getting, but the pair are not alone in their distaste. Porgs and other cute Star Wars critters are, to a certain subset of fans, unwanted reminders that this franchise is for children. To varying degrees, porgs, Baby Yoda, the Ewoks, BB-8, and R2-D2 are all representatives of “cute Star Wars.” (Ridley’s porg stance does not apply to the droids, as Force Awakens director J. J. Abrams kept having to remind her not to baby-talk the droids.)

Return of the Jedi might be the worst offender in this regard, as the Ewoks were tribalistic teddy bears who were essential to the core plot of the movie. Porgs were cute comic relief who were certainly designed with toy sales in mind, but at least they weren’t responsible for bringing down squadrons of First Order stormtroopers with their little beaks. Baby Yoda, on the other hand, is the driving force of The Mandalorian’s entire plot, but he’s weapons-grade cute and surrounded by a fairly dark bounty-hunter morality tale.

It’s unclear if Rise of Skywalker will continue the Star Wars tradition of introducing cute, cuddly-wuddly characters. D-0, a new droid who looks like the Pixar lamp on a big wheel, could qualify. It will be hard for anybody to beat Baby Yoda, though, and if in a couple of months Adam Driver comes out as being against Baby Yoda, we will not show him the same deference we gave to Ridley when she made her porg feelings clear. Baby Yoda is a galactic treasure.


Chewbacca wimped out, but you don't have to.

Originally Appeared on GQ