In what has to be the article winning title of the day, V Magazine catches up with Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver as Kylo Ren quizzes Rey about – amongst other topics – Star Wars.
AD What were your initial conversations with J.J. [Abrams] about your character? Did you know the character’s name was Rey?
DR No, no, he told me it was meant to be Keera. And then, when we were already shooting in Abu Dhabi, he told me that he was thinking of going with Rey, which I thought was frickin’ awesome. But because I had to audition so much and everything, I never really had a conversation with J.J. about it until I had read the script. So, I had no sense of what I was getting into. No sense of what was really going to happen or what anything would entail. I hadn’t done a film before, so it was a whole new thing. It’s such a crazy thing the first time around: Even if [J.J. and I] had had a conversation about it, nothing would’ve even made sense at that point anyway. It was unfolding as we went along.
AD Right. When you were initially auditioning, you were just kind of [going with] first impulses, which really seemed to turn out to be right.
DR Yeah. I mean, of course things were said in the moment, but it wasn’t like a deep [conversation] about the character’s journey, or what was going to happen [in the film], or who the relationships were with. When I was auditioning, the sides weren’t even real—the characters on each side weren’t real—so I had no idea. And then obviously, with Rian [Jedi] doing the [Star Wars: The Last Jedi], it becomes a changing story, because different people have different opinions as to what the story is and what the trajectory is.