“They’re All Political”: Daisy Ridley On Star Wars And Her New Movie Cleaner

Daisy Ridley may be best known for her role as Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, but in the years since The Force Awakens, she’s been able to show her range goes to the Outer Rim and back. She’s played a reimagined Shakespearean heroine in Ophelia, a determined swimmer in The Young Woman and the Sea, and a dystopian anomaly in Chaos Walking.

Now, she’s trying her hand at action with Cleaner, an action movie that asks the question “What if Die Hard, but John McClane is a badass female window cleaner?” The comparison isn’t lost on Ridley. “I called it Dry Shard because we were supposed to be on the Shard,” Ridley tells Inverse, referring to the iconic building in the London skyline.

But spreading her wings doesn’t mean Ridley is done with Star Wars altogether. Ridley is returning to Star Wars movies with a new sequel film directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, colloquially known as New Jedi Order.

The movie has gone through some development issues, with three different writers leaving the project. The Bourne Ultimatum writer George Nolfi is the latest to take a crack at the script, and in a recent interview with Film Stories, he proved he understood the legacy he’s about to take on. “If you think about George Lucas, the six movies that he did, and the universe that he created, it’s actually very steeped in broad notions of politics,” Nolfi said. “It’s not talking about today, per se, but there’s the Empire’s Nazism slash Roman Empire.”

It’s a concept Ridley agrees with whole-heartedly. “I feel like [the Star Wars films] are all political. I feel like it's the individual versus the big corporation or the big group, so I think they always have been,” Ridley tells Inverse. “And ultimately I think the films are emotional in that it's good and evil, which we all can relate to very specifically in our day-to-day lives. But yes, I do feel those conversations are woven within the story, and I'm very excited to see what George does.”

“Those conversations are woven within the story, and I'm very excited to see what George does.”

Cleaner also understands the ability of films to raise bigger political issues. The movie follows Joey (Ridley), a cleaner and former soldier as she defends a building from a group of activists who, in turn, find their mission hijacked by one extremist. It comes to her to save the building, the future of the human race, and perhaps most importantly, her neurodivergent brother.

Ridley spends a good portion of the movie dangling outside the building on a window cleaning cradle, something that posed an issue logistically during production. “We would be doing Scene 10 and then Scene 30 right after, depending on the cradle, because it was such a specific thing of where I was on the building and how I was strapped in, and maintaining that energy was exhausting.”

But it wasn’t the high-stakes action that drew Ridley to the role: it’s the relationship Joey shares with her brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), who is neurodivergent and carries Thor’s hammer everywhere he goes. “I spoke to a few people close to me who have a similar sibling dynamic of neurotypical and neurodivergent and one slightly in more of a caregiving position, and honestly really wanted to honor that,” Ridley says. “I think the relationship me and Matt were able to create was so sibling and complicated and not always straightforward, but so much of Joey, she's really trying to do the right thing.”

So while Ridley may be exploring movies outside of the Star Wars universe, some things, like the balancing of action and heart, defy genre. Cleaner may not be set in a galaxy far, far away, but it’s the same story of good fighting over evil.

Cleaner premieres in theaters February 21, 2025.