“I was like a duck,” says Young Woman and the Sea star Daisy Ridley. “You have to squish. Everything up here was fine,” she says, gesturing to her upper body, “and everything down below the water was, like, panic.”
Ridley, speaking during a virtual press conference for Young Woman and the Sea ahead of its release on Disney+, should have audiences quacking over her performance as Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle. The American athlete made history on August 6, 1926 as the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel. Young Woman and the Sea offers an inspirational account of Ederle’s dedication to her sport and her quest to prove that women deserve opportunities equal to men. Ridley betrays not a hint of her own panic as she keeps Ederle’s focus precise throughout the icy swim.
Young Woman and the Sea gives a worthy swimmer’s saga in the wake of Nyad, which recently earned Annette Bening an Oscar nomination for her performance as Diana Nyad, who made history for swimming unassisted from Cuba to Florida in 2013. As with Bening’s turn in Nyad, Young Woman and the Sea gives Ridley a role that’s as demanding physically as it is emotionally. The Star Wars ingénue tackles it remarkably and finds in Ederle her best part to date.
A committed and inspiring performance sees Ridley confront one of her own fears while bringing Ederle’s story to the screen. “I told them that I had a bit of a fear of open water, which was probably an underselling of it, because I actually don’t go in the sea beyond where I can see the floor,” Ridley says of broaching her anxiety to director Joachim Rønning and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “It was mentally a hurdle. And then the physical [aspect] was what it was, but the pride with which I carried myself after having done it was immense.”
Ridley adds that she worked with swimming coach Siobhan O’Connor to overcome the daunting challenge of traversing deep waters, and to ensure that any concerns for sharks didn’t betray Ederle’s fearlessness. The actor credits the British swimmer, who previously won a silver medal at the 2016 Olympics and won gold at the 2014 and 2018 Commonwealth Games, for getting her into shape as intensely as Trudy’s own coach does in the film. She says the only option was to literally dive into Ederle’s passion.
“Swimming is unlike other sports in that you can’t do supplementary work to get your swimming better other than just swimming,” explains Ridley. “Learning a totally new skill was difficult—and honestly, all of the physicality. We were swimming throughout the shoot, and then we had the big swim at the end of the shoot. All of that was taxing in its way, but really, it was the mental hurdle of overcoming the big swim [that was the biggest challenge].”
Even though audiences approaching the story likely know the outcome of Ederle’s swim, her trek across the dark and choppy waters of the English Channel proves a thrill. That’s largely thanks to Ridley’s command of the waves. Her breathing, her strokes, and the look of determination in her eyes keep a viewer along for the swim as she conveys Ederle’s stamina.
But the actress says that connecting with the elements helped her enter Ederle’s mindset knowing that she faced many of the same elements. “We were out really in the open water,” she notes. “There’s only so much you can prepare for when you know what that environment’s going be like. You can’t prepare for the cold. You can’t prepare for the shock. Amazing doubles would line up for me in the water, and I’d get in, and then the Alsace [River] would start moving. I would have to keep pace with the Alsace, keep pace with the camera. There was a lot to think about.”
Bruckheimer, who’s no stranger to big productions on the high seas, says that working on water can be one of the toughest elements of a shoot. “It’s calm, it’s exciting, it’s explosive,” he says. “Water just adds to the drama.”
Bruckheimer also credits Rønning for working movie magic by drawing upon his experience with aquatic shoots for the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki, which dramatized the true story of an epic 1947 rafting mission across the Pacific Ocean, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the 2017 instalment in Bruckheimer’s swashbuckling franchise.
“The currents constantly change and the winds constantly change, so the boat keeps moving in a different direction, and you have to follow the sun. Otherwise, it won’t match,” adds Bruckheimer. “You have to keep moving and turning. Daisy’s gotta keep turning into the water in a different angle to get the sun in the right place.”
Rønning adds that the arduous nature of the shoot adds a symbolic element. “I usually draw a parallel: if you’re crossing an ocean, you have the experience if you’ve done it before, but there’s always going to be [something] different. The weather’s gonna change and, the currents and everything, but experience will always help you in some way,” he says. “I don’t want to put Daisy in the water one second earlier than she absolutely has to go in there. It’s stressful. But at the end of the day, it’s rewarding because we were out there and we did it, being able to capture that beauty and channelling Trudy in the real elements.”
While the historic triumph on the English Channel inevitably proves the draw of Young Woman and the Sea, the heart of the film comes from Ederle’s relationship with her sister Meg, played by Tilda Cobham-Hervey (Hotel Mumbai, I Am Woman). The first act of the film sees Trudy and Meg win over the support of their mother (Jeanette Hain), who enlists them in swimming lessons. As the younger Trudy eventually excels in the water over Meg, the elder sister resigns herself to the domestic life that’s expected of her. However, Meg becomes Trudy’s biggest champion throughout the landmark swim.
Ridley sees the relationship between the sisters as indicative of what Ederle’s triumph means for women both then and now. “Trudy has freedom. Even though she’s overcoming everything, she is actually able to do the thing that she has set her heart to do,” observes Ridley. “Meg is representative of what essentially every other woman had to do. Do what your parents tell you, get married, stay in the shop. There’s no other option for Meg.”
The actor adds that she’s surprised how few people recognize Ederle’s name when so many men are lauded for their history making feats. “We’re a hundred years later and we’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s still a lot of progress to be made. Even in the couple years since we filmed, there’s been a lot more conversation about, particularly, women in sport. So, to be part of any conversation from that time to now, and showing what it was like for people, then is very important,” says Ridley.
Rønning agrees and admits that he first heard of Trudy Ederle upon receiving the script by Jeff Nathanson. “This was such a seismic event when it took place, and probably changed women’s sports forever in some degree,” says the director. “One of the questions that we really try to answer is why she does it. It was important with her family around: they’re representing her, and the period, the culture, the social norms—everything of the time—and try to put that into perspective.”
Equally indicative, perhaps, is Bruckheimer’s story about how the project came to him in the first place. “Jeff Nathanson trying to find something for his daughters to watch, and he couldn’t find anything,” he explains. “So, he went to a used bookstore and found this book, Young Woman and the Sea.” After picking up Glenn Stout’s account of Ederle’s journey, the screenwriter’s daughters have both a movie to watch and a character who can inspiring them.
For Ridley, bringing the true story of such n fearless woman to screen proves more thrilling than the biggest adventures of Star Wars could afford. “This actually happened,” says Ridley. “This woman set out to do something that people thought was literally impossible for women. She overcame obstacles in order to do that. And then over the past hundred or so years, for whatever reason, that has been lost.”
