English actress has been living with Graves’ disease for nearly a year.
“It’s the first time I’ve shared that,” Ridley, 32, shared in her Women’s Health cover story, released on Tuesday, August 6, revealing that she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease — an “immune system condition that affects the thyroid gland,” according to the Mayo Clinic — in September 2023.
After filming the movie Magpie, which premiered at the SXSW festival in March, Ridley started to “feel poorly,” but she chalked it up to the “stressful role” she had just finished.
“It was funny, I was like, ‘Oh, I just thought I was annoyed at the world,’ but turns out everything is functioning so quickly, you can’t chill out,” Ridley explained.
Following her diagnosis, she’s started medication and has focused on her diet, making the decision to go gluten-free on top of her vegan lifestyle. (Ridley has previously shared her endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome diagnoses.)
“I am not super strict about it, but generally cutting down on gluten makes me feel better,” the actress told the magazine. “I’ve always been health conscious, and now I’m trying to be more well-being conscious. I do a fair amount of the holistic stuff, but I also understand that it is a privilege to be able to do those things.”
Now, Ridley is using infrared saunas, cryotherapy, getting massages and acupuncture on top of her normal routine.
“I didn’t realize how bad I felt before,” she said, in part, explaining that it’s become “normalized” for women to “not feel good.”
Ridley is not naïve to the fact that her Graves’ disease diagnosis is “much less severe than what a lot of people go through,” but she advocated for people to seek answers about their health if they sense a problem.
This is hardly the first time Ridley has spoken publicly about her health. Earlier this year, she admitted that being cast as Rey in the Star Wars franchise caused a health scare and heightened anxiety. While Ridley thought she was “coping well” with the pressure at first, she eventually realized the opposite.
Ridley told Inverse magazine in January that her anxiety got so bad after The Last Jedi premiered in 2017 that she developed “holes in her stomach wall.” This led to her taking a break from Hollywood before 2019’s The Rise of the Skywalker.
“After the last Star Wars came out and everything was quiet, I was like, ‘What the f–k?’ I was grieving,” she recalled, noting that the 2020 lockdown became “helpful” for her health. “I realized there was a lot that I hadn’t processed properly.”
