In MovieWeb’s last interview with Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley, she revealed how it’s misleading to think she hasn’t been keeping busy since Star Wars. We caught up with her last when The Marsh King’s Daughter was released, but before that, it had been a while since we saw her in a starring vehicle. Now, Ridley has a quirky new drama hitting U.S. theaters following a successful festival run.

Sometimes I Think About Dying (quite the title) centers on Ridley as Fran, a quiet, socially awkward admin worker at a mundane workplace. But this feature film from director Rachel Lambert becomes so much more. We recently caught up with Ridley and Lambert in a paired interview to learn more about this uniquely thought-provoking film, and how difficult it was not to laugh during certain scenes. Ridley also hints at her upcoming Star Wars feature, which is still in the very early stages.

Ridley’s Latest Role: ‘Quite Different From Me’

As showcased in films like The Force Awakens and The Marsh King’s Daughter, Ridley can play a sharp, well-spoken leading lady with ease. She is also the star of Sometimes I Think About Dying, but, in an intentional move, we don’t actually hear her character Fran speak until about 20 minutes in. “Daisy is so good in that first 20 minutes or so,” said director Lambert. “You know exactly what’s going on in her inner life.”

Ridley is so good that Lambert ended up scrapping Fran’s narration from the final edit altogether. “There was voiceover that we didn’t use in the film, but I basically used that like stage directions, really,” said Ridley in sharing more about Fran. She elaborated:

“When she tells the joke, [her coworker] Robert goes, ‘You’re funny.’ The line was, ‘I am funny.’ So it was like, she has self-esteem. There are different moments that it comes out, different moments that it’s harder for her to connect with the world around her. And I certainly don’t ‘think about dying,’ but I’ve definitely thought, ‘Who would go to my funeral? Who would go, who would cry? And who would I ban from going?'”

Ridley nails the part, and it certainly helps from the get-go to relate to the character on a personal level. “I feel like Fran is quite far away from me, but there are things that I recognize in her in some ways,” Ridley told MovieWeb.

“I recognize myself in her, but I recognize other people in her. And I think that’s why the film has been received in some ways differently by a lot of people, because there are many things to her. And there were amazingly different things to play. Sometimes she is like, ‘Actually, I cannot connect in this moment.’ And sometimes she’s like, ‘I don’t want to connect in this moment.’ And she tells jokes because she actually thinks she’s funny.”

Related: Star Wars: Daisy Ridley Shares Her First Read-Through Experience with Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher

Lambert was in agreement in terms of relatability throughout their new film, and it extends beyond the character of Fran. “I saw my sense of humor in the script, which is dry,” said Lambert. “I saw things that were on my mind in so many ways, particularly because the script came at the end of 2020 to me, so we had the vaccines that hadn’t been released yet to the public. So this notion of paying attention to how you spent the day, the attention paid to what we fill our minutes with, was really resonant for me.”

Megan Stalter and the Future of Star Wars
Lucasfilms

A stark contrast to Fran’s reserved persona in Sometimes I Think About Dying is her bubbly boss, played to hilarious perfection by Megan Stalter (Hacks). Anyone who has a supervisor they might privately roll their eyes at can certainly relate to this dynamic. “I do remember when she had to come over and ask me to sign a card,” said Ridley in reference to a deadpan-funny scene alongside Stalter. “She wasn’t supposed to say anything. And she came over… and I was looking at her thinking, ‘How in God’s name am I going to not laugh each time?’ She’s just really funny.”

Lambert continued, regarding Stalter’s scene-stealing performance:

“She’s an incredibly demure, game and sensitive artist, and collaborative. So in the first scene that we shot with her with the conference room, it was made very clear that it was like, ‘Let’s just play.’ And so she ran with that. And there was a lot of benefit to that, both on screen and off. Poor Daisy, this poor thing is gonna laugh, and she started saying it’s gonna be too hard. But then, there were times where the whole ensemble was dialed in together so beautifully. And she was a member of that team.”

Looking ahead, we were curious if Ridley had any updates on her highly anticipated next Star Wars film. “I have nothing,” she told us, while noting that she doesn’t mind being asked. “I’m waiting because of the strikes. I am waiting to read a script, which is being worked on.”

Daisy Ridley Buries the Dead in a New Zombie Apocalypse
Oscilloscope Laboratories

In addition to her next film Magpie, which will be featured at this year’s SXSW festival, Ridley was quite vocal about another project she’s eager to take on. “The movie I’m doing in Western Australia,” began Ridley, “Tasmania gets nuked, and I play a character who is going to be part of the body retrieval unit because the people that were hit by this thing are somewhere between life and death, as we might say, zombified. And I play a character who’s going to find her husband. But you see that they’ve had a difficult time, so she’s overcoming a lot of stuff. She’s physically trying to find him and also reconcile what’s just gone on between the two of them […] It’s called We Bury the Dead.”

Related: Daisy Ridley on Her Powerful Lead Role as The Marsh King’s Daughter

It’s yet another unique film in Ridley’s repertoire, part of what makes her one of the most chameleonic and hard-working actors of her generation. You can tell she’s taking aesthetic mental snapshots throughout every film, building her talent as she plays hopscotch through both Hollywood and the indie film world.

I think it’s been five films I’ve made in the past few years, and all of them are so different, and the filmmakers are so different… I like learning and having the ability to be on sets with different people and take whatever I can from the people around me.

In the meantime, from Oscilloscope Laboratories, Sometimes I Think About Dying is now playing in U.S. theaters.