Just days before, however, she was confronted by the darker side of the celebrity industrial complex. "I was followed home by someone in a van, this fucking paparazzi person." Ridley appears shaken and I say that, as awful as her experience was, it seems preferable to being trailed by a psychotic stalker. "But is it? Is it better? Is it even different? I was still by myself and being followed wherever I went and they now have the number plate of the car I was in... That's where it's more scary as a woman. I have to be so vigilant with security and keeping myself safe. It's horrid."
Just as disconcerting to Ridley is the way in which she began questioning her psyche and second-guessing her self-preservation instincts. "I kept thinking, 'Am I being a drama queen? Am I paranoid?'" she recalls, her eyes welling up with tears she doesn't allow to spill over. "I wasn't. It was real. It was fucking real and scary."
The world is a cyclone," Ridley says. "See? Everything out there" – she waves her hand around and at the outside – "is the cyclone. And then there's the solid thing at the centre of it all." Ridley is describing her most recent tattoo (located somewhere on her torso; it's not for public display): swirling winds around a star. "That solid star is my family.
...
The reasons she left Instagram were personal, not political. She had "a lot of growing up to do". She wasn't equipped to handle the pressure to perform in public and share her life via posts. She needed privacy, online and off. Wherever she went, photographers chased her, people gawked at her, interrupted her meals and conversations to ask for photos. The fact this could have been predicted didn't make it any less painful for Ridley, who was crippled by the scrutiny and continuously felt anxious, self-conscious, cornered. No sooner had she moved into a new flat than a pair of fans found her, knocked on her door and pressed her to take a photo. She would phone her mother in a crying jag, saying, "I'm not equipped to deal with this!" with alarming regularity. She began
therapy, which helped.
...
In every way, Ridley was a victim of her success: it had bred the anxiety that wracked her body and it left her in a state of exhaustion from overwork. She had heeded the advice Abrams gave her while making
The Force Awakens. "He said, 'Take your time choosing your next job. People will offer you things, but just wait till the film comes out.' That was amazing advice.
...
Amid the routines of home, Ridley found other forms of normalcy beginning to return. "I started going on the Tube again. And I was like, 'You know what? The world didn't stop turning. It's really fine.' It was everybody else making me feel like this was terrifying that made it so terrifying." She is also able to speak out when she needs to and advocate for herself. "For so long, I was so scared to say to anyone, 'It's not all good all the time.' Because you know what? It's not all good all the time. I can say that now. Say no. Now I think I'm very nicely balanced."
...
"There are people that are never going to fuckin' like it and there's no other way around it," she says. "But I think people are going to feel like this was made with a lot of love and JJ worked really hard to tie up nine films. It's impossible to make everyone happy.
"Some of the shit people have said to me about
Star Wars you wouldn't believe," she says. "I have had people say to me, 'I mean, it wasn't a great film, was it?' I'm like, that's just bad manners. That's fuckin' not nice."
Ridley shrugs. She knows her calls for civility will only do so much. But she seems much more confident in her ability to cope. Since the most recent trailer was released, she's felt an awakening; the paparazzi and selfie seekers have returned with a vengeance. "There has definitely been quite a shift in being recognised. It's taken me back, but in a new, more intense way," she says, then she winks. "I'm navigating it."
