Daisy Ridley couldn’t get work after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Star Wars vet Daisy Ridley (Rey) discusses how hard it was to find work after The Rise of Skywalker, while Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico) lands a new role at Disney.

The Rise of Skywalker bowed in December of last year, capping of a tremendously lucrative new trilogy Star Wars movies. You’d think that the woman at the center of them, Daisy Ridley (Rey) would be beset with job offers after that, but as the English actor recently revealed to Entertainment Weekly, that wasn’t the case.

“It was so sad to finish [Star Wars],” she said. “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. I was like, ‘Aww! No one wants to employ me’…I had that moment of ‘Oh my god!’ and then just thought ‘everything in its right time.’"

Things did pick up later, and Ridley landed a role alongside James McAvoy in the video game Twelve Minutes, as well as a part in the Oculus Quest film Baba Yaga, acting with the likes of Glenn Close, Jennifer Hudson and Kate Winslet.

At this point, it’s actually pretty standard for the faces of Star Wars to not get a ton of work right afterwards. Ridley’s story reminds me a little Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy only to sort of fade from the limelight, while costar Natalie Portman (Padmé Amidala) went on to bigger things. In the original trilogy, Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) never became the big star that Harrison Ford (Han Solo) did, although he did have a long career in voice acting after that, which seems to be something Ridley is interested in. And while Ridley may not be headlining many new movies, you can soon see her costar Oscar Issac (Poe Dameron) in Dune, one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year.

Speaking of Star Wars vets getting work, Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico) revealed this week that she’s been cast as Raya in Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, an animated movie about a young warrior who seeks out the help of dragons to fight off an evil threat, only to find that the last dragon (Awkwafina) has gotten stuck in human form.

Tran is replacing Cassie Steele, who was previously cast in the part.

Raya and the Last Dragon has suffered numerous delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it sounds like an interesting project, and the first Disney movie to draw inspiration from Southeast Asian cultures. “I felt so seen, and it was such a blissful feeling,” Tran said of the film’s approach to representation. “I don’t know if I can even explain it, but it was this surprise. I’ve worked on some things before which obviously weren’t as culturally specific as this, and I don’t think that I knew that I needed that.”

Raya and the Last Dragon is due out in theaters on March 12, 2021.

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