In a career that ranges from “Star Wars” blockbusters, classic whodunits (“Murder on the Orient Express”) and indie films like the just-opened “Magpie,” Daisy Ridley has shown she charts her own course.
For “Magpie,” a noir-ish thriller set outside London, Ridley, 32, dreamed up the story. Her husband and fellow producer Tom Bateman scripted, while she stars as Anette, a possibly unstable wife and mother of two.
Anette is miserable, married to a blocked writer (Shazad Latif) with a hair-trigger temper. Their young daughter is cast as an aristocratic lady’s child in a historical drama filming nearby. Hubby goes bananas for the film’s star. Despite the on-set presence of his little girl, the actress encourages his intentions. Anette is hardly oblivious.
The title “Magpie,” Ridley said in a Zoom interview, refers to a bird that especially in the UK, “has a lot of folklore attached to it. And I’m superstitious.
“Because magpies are among the few animals that mate for life, if you see one alone, one would assume tragedy has befallen the bird.
“Also, magpies steal shiny things — that’s the other thing they’re known for. So the title refers to different aspects of a few of the characters but felt particularly apt for Anette.”
“Magpie” is her third film this year. What do these movies say about women?
“My choices,” she said, “reflect a wide range of love of film. ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying,’ I loved the script so much and loved playing Fran who is really overcoming something incredibly human, incredibly relatable: The difficulty of connection and how to overcome your own fear of connecting with the people around us.
“In ‘Young Woman and the Sea’ it’s an unbelievable challenge that Trudy is facing” – swimming across the English Channel in 1926. “Years ago, women were really not able to do anything except be wives and mothers and being told constantly that you can’t do something huge. And it’s also a true story and we’re honoring someone.”
In “Magpie” Anette “is overcoming something relatable in terms of being in a difficult relationship and feeling trapped.
“Certainly these three women are all overcoming quite different things. But I love storytelling and working in different environments. The fact that I haven’t worked in the UK outside of ‘Star Wars’ and the ‘Orient Express’ made me really want to make a British film with ‘Magpie.’
“I suppose that’s a long way of saying I love playing all different sorts of characters. Hopefully I’m able to carry on doing all sorts of different things.
“Whether it’s the scale of swimming the Channel or breaking out of the bonds of a difficult marriage.”
“Magpie” is in theaters now