Daisy Ridley: 'I would get plonked in the sea and be very overwhelmed'
Daisy Ridley as Trudy Ederle in Young Woman and the Sea.
WHEN Daisy Ridley signed up to star as Trudy Ederle - the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel - taking on the role wasn’t the only challenge she faced.
Ridley has long had a fear of the open water - but she was determined to conquer her issues to tell Ederle’s remarkable story.
As she prepared to train for the production, she revealed her fear to the movie’s producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Joachim Ronning and writer Jeff Nathanson, and they initially thought she was joking.
“I was just about to start training, I said: ‘You know, I'm scared of open water?’ and everyone goes: ‘Hahaha!’ because they were probably thinking: ‘Why you have signed up?’” says Ridley.
“The thing is, when you really want to do something, but you're scared of the thing, there’s a deal you’re making with yourself, overcoming that thing and not letting that become an obstacle.
“So it was mentally an obstacle that I had to overcome. I don’t like going beyond where I can see (the ocean floor), but there was also no way that I was going to let that interrupt the filming.”
Keen to star in the film where filmmakers were keen to shoot as much as possible authentically and in the water, Ridley felt the fear and did it anyway. “I would get plonked in the sea and be very overwhelmed, think: ‘What have I done?’ And then we'd film, and I'd get back on the boat and to the people around me who were my amazing support system - my hair and makeup artist, my costumer, my swimming coach.
“We would go to the boat, and I would be able to shake that off and gather myself again, ready to do it again. So it never manifests itself on set, but certainly there were times where I stepped away from set and thought: this is so hard and so scary.”
Many actors take on difficult challenges and become so enamoured with their new skill that they keep it up as a pastime. For Ridley, that was not the case.
“I have not been in the sea again. I thought maybe at the end of it, I would love open water swimming, and that’s something I would do, but it’s not for me. I’m just not built in an endurance way. It’s so wondrous to me that people do it, but even those moments of getting in, it gave me even more respect for what she was doing at that time that had never been done before.”
New to Disney+, The Young Woman and the Sea is a rousing period sports drama which tells how Ederle overcame adversity and the restrictiveness of a patriarchal society to become the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. For Ridley, who first became a household name in Star Wars: The Force Awakens - including an epic finale on Skellig Michael in Co Kerry - shooting in real locations was part of the appeal.
“In Star Wars, I didn't really work with much green screen at all. It was very practical. The green screen was space, because we certainly didn’t film in space! But otherwise we had amazing sets. So I’ve been lucky in that everything I’ve done, I’ve been interacting with real spaces, even if they’re built. Certainly being at sea was something that could not have been faked. I think watching the film, there is a feeling that it would have been very difficult to replicate if we weren't really there.
“It certainly gave me a sense, and I think gives the film a sense, of that distance and that majesty of the ocean and the fear and the exhilaration and the terror and the unknown.”
Ridley originally came to the movie as an actor, but as she became more involved creatively in the production, was credited as an Executive Producer. She has been bitten by the bug, and produced from scratch the forthcoming Magpie. The drama tells the story of how a couple’s lives are upended when their daughter is cast opposite a controversial star.
“I made a movie with my husband (actor Tom Bateman) last year, and it was really the first time I was a producer from the very beginning. I had the idea for the film, and then financing, getting crew, getting cast, making the film, finishing the film, selling the film.
“That was really my true experience of being over the whole thing, and what I felt going into it was that I wanted the set to feel safe and I wanted people to feel creatively fulfilled. Communication is the most important thing. On sets people are working really long hours, and if the communication isn’t quite there, things get lost in translation. It’s a group of people, and our combined vision is telling the story. So having seen sets where the communication was great and people felt happy and creatively fulfilled, that was what I wanted to take into my own movie making.”
- Young Woman and the Sea is on Disney+ from Friday, July 19
Over a lengthy career as one of Hollywood’s most-powerful film producers, Jerry Bruckheimer has been instrumental in bringing blockbusters such as Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Armageddon to our screens. But he has always been interested in rejuvenating real-life stories that he’d like people to remember. And when he heard of Trudy Ederle’s epic attempt to make sporting history, he jumped at the opportunity to bring it to the screen.
“It really started with Jeff Nathanson, who wrote the screenplay,” says Bruckheimer. “He was trying to find something for his daughters to watch. He couldn’t find anything, so he went to a used bookstore and found this book, Young Woman and the Sea, and he brought it to us. This woman in the English Channel, not only did she swim it, she broke the men’s record by two hours, which is amazing. It’s a really inspirational story, and I love to tell stories about people who inspire other people. She had so much adversity to get to where she finally swam the channel.”
Bruckheimer has told such stories many times over a five-decade career, since becoming a Hollywood producer in the 1970s following a successful stint in advertising.
“We’ve done this a lot. We did movies like Glory Road, Remember The Titans and Black Hawk Down, these true-life stories about individuals that had been lost. Dangerous Minds with Michelle Pfeiffer was the same thing, about a teacher up in Northern California who changed these kids’ lives.”
He agrees that many of the best sports movies are about more than the sport itself. “It's always the emotion. It's always how you tell the story, great characters and a terrific theme. When we made Top Gun: Maverick, the planes were great. But what really made the movie a huge hit was the emotion. Same thing with this film.
“I love what I do. I love the fact that we can make people’s lives better for a couple of hours. We can entertain them, take them away from whatever they’re thinking about, and just captivate them emotionally through the ride that we give. We always say we’re in the transportation business. We transport you from one place to another.”
- Young Woman and the Sea streams on Disney+ from Friday, July 19
