Daisy Ridley says ‘no one wanted to employ her’ after Star Wars

Rey actor has found work in video games and in voice roles since end of franchise

Daisy Ridley struggled to find work in the wake of Star Wars, the British actor has revealed.

Ridley shot to fame playing Rey in the rebooted Star Wars trilogy, which came to an end with December 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, but she found herself fruitlessly auditioning for parts in early 2020 and receiving few acting offers.

“Weirdly, at the beginning of the year nothing was coming through,” Ridley told Entertainment Weekly.

“I was like, ‘Aww! No one wants to employ me’… There were actually loads of things that I auditioned for at the beginning of the year and didn’t get any of them.”

She continued: “I had that moment of, ‘Oh my god!’ and then just thought, ‘Everything in its right time’.”

Ridley went on to say that struggling for work, and then entering lockdown, allowed her to finally “process” leaving Star Wars behind. “To be forced to slow down, it was good mentally for me because [Star Wars was] a big thing in my life," she said.

Ridley has most recently lent her voice to a video game titled Twelve Minutes, and was announced as a voice in a virtual reality film based on the Baba Yaga myth. Kate Winslet and Jennifer Hudson are also among the voice cast.

Daisy Ridley as Rey in ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ (2019) (Disney)

Away from Star Wars, Ridley has appeared in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and voiced a rabbit in 2018’s Peter Rabbit.

She also stars alongside Tom Holland in the delayed dystopian epic Chaos Walking, which completed filming in 2017 but was forced to wait years in order to complete reshoots due to the franchise schedules of Ridley and Holland. It is not scheduled for release until January 2021.