Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker will supposedly be the end of the mainline Star Wars saga that we’ve followed since the ‘70s, but there are still plenty of other Star Wars stories on the horizon—specifically The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson’s mysterious trilogy and whatever Game Of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are doing, not to mention the TV shows. We don’t really know what to expect from the future of Star Wars, but one thing we do know now is that Daisy Ridley’s Rey won’t be there.
Speaking with BuzzFeed on Periscope (millennials are always on their phones, guys!), Ridley revealed that she’s “not in the next trilogy.” She goes on to say that she’s not sure what the next Star Wars movie will be, whether it’s—in her words—”the Rian one” or “the guys that did Game Of Thrones,” but she does know that “they always said it was going to be a separate story,” so she’s not in it. That being said, she also offered a well-worded non-answer when asked if she would ever return to the Star Wars universe, so it’s probably safe to assume that we haven’t seen the last of Rey, even if she doesn’t pop up in whatever the next movie is. At the very least, Disney will probably want to make a new sequel series in a few decades with older Rey training a new generation of Jedi, or maybe a “live-action” remake of The Force Awakens where everybody is a CG lion, so there’s no chance that Disney will be dropping Rey permanently.
As for what the next Star Wars movie will be, regardless of Ridley’s involvement, we heard in May that it would be made by the aforementioned guys that did Game Of Thrones—whether that means writing or directing or whatever is unclear, though. Interestingly, Disney boss Bob Iger implied that Benioff and Weiss are only making “the next movie,” so we don’t know if they’re actually making a trilogy, if the next movie will be part of a trilogy at all, or if it’ll be another standalone story like Rogue One. What we do know, once again, is that Daisy Ridley won’t be in it.
Unless she’s lying, which is very possible. We all saw the winking denials from the Marvel people when fans asked about T’Challa and Peter Parker coming back for more Black Panther and Spider-Man movies. The last thing you should ever do is trust someone who makes movies, especially if the movies they make are part of an enormous corporate machine.