



1 / 5 Chevron Chevron Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, November 2017 Green-Eyed Girl At 21, Daisy Ridley was plucked from relative obscurity and catapulted to galactic fame in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now 25, she is still processing the transformation. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

“They’re really heavy,” Daisy Ridley says. “Three, four, five kilos? And the weight’s very unevenly distributed.” She’s talking about lightsabers—and explaining that if you’re actually in a Star Wars movie, you can’t just pick one up and wave it around, as children have been doing in their bedrooms for the past 40 years. Not at all. In real life—or rather, for real movies—special conditioning is in order. Before she could film fight scenes for Star Wars: The Last Jedi—the second in the trilogy in which she plays Rey, the heroine—she undertook a kind of neon martial-arts training. “You do, like, eight thwacks one way, eight the other, eight up, eight down,” she says. I suggest they could market that as a form of exercise. “Yeah,” she agrees, laughing: “Lightsaber school.”

We are driving from Ridley’s hotel in Beverly Hills to a convention center in Anaheim, where 7,000 Disney fans will turn up to see her stand on a stage for a few minutes with the cast of The Last Jedi. She has been groomed for the occasion—three braids on one side of her head, revealing the tiny peace-sign tattoo behind her right ear, a Lela Rose off-the-shoulder pantsuit, and Pierre Hardy pumps embellished with eyes. Ridley, a 25-year-old Londoner, is plainspoken and fast-­moving, with a wide face and eyelids that look as though they’ve been painted onto it with a brush. (“People really open up to me; it’s hilarious,” she tells me. “Someone said it’s because I have a big face—I look honest.”) In the classic mode of contemporary London, expletives punctuate her speech. She occasionally phrases things musically, as if improvising a show tune, yet there’s something about her that suggests she’s allergic to nonsense.

Watch Daisy Ridley Rap Eminem and Show Off Her Lightsaber Skills:

When we meet, Ridley has been seen by the general public in only one film. But because that film is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, she has been thrust into a limelight comparable only, perhaps, to the attention directed at Harry Potter upon his arrival at Hogwarts. “Understand the scale,” the film’s director, J. J. Abrams, told her when he offered her the part. “This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on a level that is inconceivable.” Ridley nodded enthusiastically, but she really had no idea. “You don’t know what you’re getting into,” she tells me more than three years later, still sounding stunned.

D23 Expo, the annual midsummer convention of the official Disney fan club, is like Halloween on steroids. Out on the main floor, you might at any given moment bump into an adult Snow White or a middle-aged man wearing Mickey Mouse ears. In the greenroom, Josh Brolin is having his lunch, and Benedict Cumberbatch is chatting to Gwendoline Christie, who is here with her boyfriend, fashion designer Giles Deacon. They, at least, have ostensibly come as themselves. But the presentation they’re part of is like a circus. Numerous actors in upcoming Disney movies take brief turns onstage, doing little other than proving to the assembled fans that they are real—and smaller than you think. Ridley and her costars are dwarfed by a screen showing behind-the-scenes footage from The Last Jedi. The roar of approbation is so loud that you could easily mistake it for the ground shaking.