Emotionally intense roles can certainly take their role on actors. Bill Skarsgård once reported he left like he was losing his mind while portraying Pennywise in the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s It, for example. In a more recent thriller starring Daisy Ridley, the Star Wars alum would later reveal that her damsel-in-distress turn for Magpie was so intense during production that she thought her physical ailments surrounding the production must have been tied to the stress. Ridley opened up to Women’s Health that she later discovered it was Graves’ Disease which was causing said ailments. It says something that she equated the performance with the effects of that disease, and MovieWeb caught up with her more recently to learn about the taxing process of bringing Magpie to life.
“It actually wasn’t during the shoot that I felt super poorly. It was afterwards,” explains Ridley. “So I was looking back thinking, ‘Do I feel like this because of the lingering stress of playing her?‘ And then, of course, because also I had been working pretty consistently — I mean, I flew back from Sundance the day we started filming Magpie — and then, I think the thing with producing something really from start to finish, the business side comes in, in a way that honestly is not really my favorite. It’s not just, ‘Are we making the film we really want to see?’ It’s, ‘Are we going to be able to sell this? Are we going to be able to honor all of the people that have given their time to do this?'” She adds:
And I find emotional stress to physically affect me a lot anyway. But certainly, illness aside, it was weird. During the shoot, I sort of felt okay, although I did literally feel my shoulders were halfway up to my ears by the end of it, just holding on to so much of that. But afterward, yeah, it took a little minute to get rid of that emotional stress.
The ‘Scrutiny’ of Modern Society
Of the many facets of Ridley’s latest performance, one immediate feature of her phenomenal character in Magpie, (which she developed with husband Tom Bateman) Anette, is that strikingly short hairdo. Ridley spoke to us about the unique way in which the hairstyle became such a key ingredient in Magpie, a story of a mom of two (Ridley) whose shady husband begins an adulterous obsession with a movie star amid a local film production:
“When I cut my hair off, originally, someone literally said to me, ‘God, that’s brave.’
And I remember thinking, ‘What the f*ck are you talking about?
‘ And the sort of scrutiny that people fall under, particularly women, if they cut their hair off, and what that represents historically. And, of course, there are amazing reference performances, like
Rosemary’s Baby
… But actually, it was something that had already happened, and then we wove that in.”
“And particularly that moment [when another character in Magpie comments on the haircut] is so perfect because the person that said it to me [in real life] didn’t deliver it exactly like that, but it was such a moment of, ‘Oh my God, is nothing not unwatched,’ you know?” continues Ridley. “Does every choice that Anette makes have to be observed and have to be commented on? So actually, it was sort of an accidental way into a great moment.” From Shout! Studios, Magpie is now playing in select theaters.