Daisy Ridley shares Graves’ disease diagnosis

Daisy Ridley revealed she has been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder, in a new profile in Women’s Health. The disease affects the thyroid and can cause muscle weakness, intolerance to heat, and weight loss. Ridley tells Women’s Health that while filming the psychological thriller Magpie, she began to feel intensely irritable. The actor chalked it up to playing “a really stressful role; presumably, that’s why I feel poorly.” Her symptoms included fatigue, weight loss, hand tremors, and feeling “tired but wired.” Ridley did not suffer from the most common form of Graves, Graves’ ophthalmopathy, or thyroid eye disease, which causes eye bulging and can result in pain and vision loss.

However, Ridley is doing much better now. After her endocrinologist diagnosed her in September 2023, she implemented some lifestyle changes, including cutting gluten from her vegan diet as well as some new therapies and treatments, which she claims have helped.

“I didn’t realize how bad I felt before,” she said. “Then I looked back and thought, How did I do that?” When one considers she was filming Disney’s Young Woman And The Sea, where she played Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, her endurance is all the more impressive.

This isn’t her first time dealing with severe health issues. Ridley was diagnosed with endometriosis as a teen and polycystic ovaries in her 20s, both of which can cause significant pain and other health complications. As a result of the most recent diagnosis, Ridley learned to listen to her body better and admit when something isn’t right. She said, “We all read the stats about women being undiagnosed or underdiagnosed and sort of coming to terms with saying, ‘I really, actually don’t feel good’ and not going, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.’ It’s just normalized to not feel good.”