Q&A: Young Woman and the Sea star Daisy Ridley on the challenges of filming open-water swimming

Repeatedly jumping in and out of freezing water and crashing waves was just one of the many struggles Daisy Ridley faced while shooting her latest film, Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea.

Based on a true story and book by the same name, Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker) plays Trudy Ederle, who, in 1926, became the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel – a formidable 21-mile swim from France to England.

The movie highlights Ederle’s introduction to competitive swimming and her journey toward competing in the 1924 Olympics in Paris, before taking on the English Channel.

Ahead of the Young Woman and the Sea premiere on May 31, For The Win spoke with Ridley about her experiences filming and training to swim in open water in the Black Sea off the coast of Bulgaria.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Going into this film, were you a strong swimmer, and how much of it was shot in open water?

I was not a strong swimmer, so I basically had to learn the crawl from almost scratch. That took some months of training, and then during filming, continuing to train. And then open water — everything you see of the channel attempts in the day is open water. So there was a lot of open water swimming.

How did you train and prepare specifically for that? Because if you had to learn how to do the crawl initially, open water is daunting.

Yes. And to be honest, it was so cold — there had been a storm out to sea, so the Black Sea was unseasonably cold — so the first moment you see little Trudy and then me and Tilda [Cobham-Hervey] as Trudy and Meg in their teenage years, that water was icy. So there was also a limit to how much we could train in the open water because, honestly, it was just too cold.

So the open water aspect was all new really when it came down to filming it. We had trained primarily in pools. And then we got out to sea, and I got plunked in there, and it was all a new experience. But yes, it was quite overwhelming. And then had to do a couple things from land into the sea, where I couldn’t go [gasps] when I got in. I had to make that transition smooth.

At one point in the movie during one of the open-water scenes, there’s a line about it being about 55 degrees in the water. What was the actual temperature like for you?

I don’t know what 55 degrees is in Celsius. The water was, I’m gonna say, 10 degrees when it was really cold Celsius [about 50 degrees Fahrenheit]. No, maybe less than that, maybe five or six degrees [about 41-43 degrees Fahrenheit]. And then really, it was the shock each time. So each time I got back in to do more of the big swim, it wasn’t just that it was cold; it was that I had warmed up in between, and it was the mental hurdle of, “Ugh!”

It’s just a shock to the system each time I got back in, and then had to match the pace of the boat, and had to match the pace of the camera, and then do the acting. So it was really a combination of things. And then the approach at night. Yeah, it’s just comparable to being really quite uncomfortable, and when you’re out somewhere and go, “Oh, I wish I had many more layers on.” But you’re in a bikini, and you’re in the sea.

It sounds like you did a lot of your own swimming. Is that the case?

Yeah. I had amazing doubles, who often would line up to make sure that everything was ready to go when I got in. And they were amazing support as well. But yeah, I did do a lot.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about open-water swimming through this process?

That it’s not for me. Kudos to all the people that do it. Really love what you do. Love to watch from the banks of the shore. Love to wave you on. I’ll wait with a towel. I’ll wait with a coat and a cup of hot tea. But for the purposes of the film was very happy to do it, and then I was also very happy that it was a limited amount of time.