Daisy Ridley Has No Plans to Return to Social Media

Star Wars sequel trilogy star Daisy Ridley has no plans to return to social media. Last year, Ridley explained why she doesn't use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or other such platforms to interact with fans. Speaking to Spanish magazine S Moda (translation via Just Jared), The 28-year-old Ridley says she continues to enjoy the separation between her personal and professional lives. "I have managed to separate my personal life well from my professional life, partly probably because I'm not on social media," Ridley said. "The statistics that link them (social media sites) to anxiety are terrifying. I have friends completely addicted to their phone who have suffered with this problem."

But even knowing those statistics and seeing social media's effects on her friends aren't enough to quell all temptation for Ridley to return. "I don't want to go back, but sometimes I think about it," she said. "But the truth is that no, I won't be returning."

Ridley had been on social media for a time. She left those services in 2016 when Star Wars fans disappointed were harassing her in digital spaces because they disapproved of her character, Rey, Star Wars: The Force Awakens' debut. Ridley explained the situation to DragCast in 2020.

"I think everybody tried to mold that into something else. It really wasn't a story," Ridley said. "I was asked to go on it, and, at the time, I was like, 'Okay,' and then it got to the point where I didn't want to be on it and I was at my friend's house in L.A., and I remember being like, 'Oh, I don't want to be on Instagram,' and they were like, 'Well, why don't you come off?' and I was like, 'Oh.' And it was really a nice, autonomous decision. Because I was like, 'Oh, I don't actually have to be on it. This is nice.' And I always had a limit to what I shared anyway and, honestly, my life isn't that exciting. So there were a lot of separate things."

During the same episode, Ridley admitted that dealing with the backlash to her Star Wars movies was challenging. "It's changed film by film honestly, like 98% it's so amazing, this last film it was really tricky," she said, referring to the backlash that followed the trilogy's conclusion in 2019's Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. "January was not that nice. It was weird, I felt like all of this love that we'd sort of been shown the first time around, I was like 'Where's the love gone?' I watched the documentary, the making-of, this week, and it's so filled with love; and I think it's that tricky thing of when you're part of something that is so filled with love and then people...You know, everyone's entitled to not like something but it feels like it's changed slightly. I think in general that's because social media and what have you."

The Star War sequel trilogy and the entire Skywalker saga are streaming now on Disney+.