Daisy Ridley has remembered the time she nearly choked to death during an episode of BBC hospital drama Casualty.
In a new interview with The Guardian, a reader wrote in and said that they thought they’d spotted Ridley as a teenager in a training film about CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation].
Ridley confirmed that she was indeed the teenager in the video – and then went on to detail how she had her own emergency in the same year the video was filmed when she appeared in an episode of Casualty.
She explained: “It’s an interactive video where someone has collapsed, I give them CPR, then there are talking points. I remember it was absolutely freezing in Covent Garden flower market and we were knee-deep in water because it had been raining. But if being part of a CPR training video has genuinely helped to save someone’s life, that’s pretty amazing.”
She continued: “The same year, I almost choked on a throat sweet in an episode of Casualty after a ghost train had a terrible crash at the funfair. Apparently, it was the scariest ghost train in the UK, so they just filmed us going round and round, which was terrifying. And that was before I nearly choked to death.”
Earlier this month, Ridley opened up about distress she felt following an 2019 interview in which she was asked about her “privilege” growing up compared to her Star Wars co-star John Boyega.
Ridley starred as Rey alongside Boyega in three Star Wars outings, films The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017), and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
The comments, which were made in a Guardian interview, came after Ridley was asked by the interviewer about her “privileged” upbringing. The interviewer quizzed Ridley on “if she thinks it has been easier to be confident and navigate her celebrity because of the privilege in her life” including “boarding school and her upbringing.” Ridley attended Tring Park Performing Arts School in Hertfordshire on a scholarship.
The interviewer went on to write that Ridley felt there was “little difference between her experience and that of her co-star John Boyega, who grew up in south London to British Nigerian immigrant parents.”
Ridley said in the Guardian interview: “John grew up on a council estate in Peckham and I think me and him are similar enough that… no… Also, I went to a boarding school for performing arts, which was different.”
In an interview with The Telegraph earlier in November, Ridley opened up about the comments, claiming that her words were taken out of context.
She told the outlet: “I literally couldn’t sleep after that came out…because I felt like, honestly, it was a purposeful de-contextualising. I was reading it thinking, ‘that’s not what I meant, that’s not what I meant.’
“It was incredibly upsetting, and it’s interesting when you’ve spoken about something 100 times, and then just the lens changes slightly of how that’s viewed. I had always spoken about John and I’d always spoken about the two of us together, so that was really weird.”
Ridley is set to return to the Star Wars universe after it was announced in 2023 that she would be starring once more as Rey in a new film in the franchise.