Daisy Ridley, who must be new here, wonders where all the “love” for Star Wars went
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker is now available on home video, marking an end to what Disney dubbed “The Skywalker Saga,” so it seems like this is the perfect time for everyone to try and process their feelings about Disney’s sequel trilogy. Earlier this month, we saw the animated version of Colin Trevorrow’s unused Episode IX script, Mark Hamill wrote a letter to the fans who stuck with the series, and then Force Awakens editor Mary Jo Markey complained about how The Last Jedi undid all of J.J. Abrams’ carefully laid plans—even though we all know those plans weren’t actually going anywhere since Abrams is famously obsessed with “mystery boxes” that don’t necessarily have resolutions. Now, Daisy Ridley has joined in, revealing in a recent interview on Nina West’s DragCast (via NME) that she was kind of surprised by the backlash that The Rise Of Skywalker received when it came out.
Ridley says “98 percent” of the experience making Star Wars movies was “amazing,” but after Rise Of Skywalker, it was “really tricky.” She says January, after the movie came out, was “not that nice,” to the point where she wondered where “the love” for the series had gone. She notes that everyone’s entitled to their opinion and that social media in general allows negative reactions to gain more traction than they otherwise would, but she says it was hard to keep seeing posts from people who didn’t like the movie, especially when she felt “really proud” of what they had made and that she was “so thrilled to be part of it.”
Basically, Daisy Ridley enjoyed making her Star Wars movies and is proud of them, but it threw her off to see that her experience didn’t necessarily translate into a good film. So that makes us wonder if anybody has briefed her on, say, the reaction to the Star Wars prequels. Or the remasters with new effects. Or literally any other Star Wars thing that hasn’t been met with overwhelming enthusiasm. Hell, The Last Jedi was one of the best things to happen to the series in decades and people are still arguing about how it was actually bad. It’s one thing to be disappointed that fans didn’t like the movie, but nobody should be surprised that Star Wars fans didn’t like something. Most of them don’t even like Star Wars.