Privilege – NOUN. A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. “education is a right, not a privilege” synonyms: advantage · right · more
Another Day, Another Actress Going ‘Off Script’
Daisy Ridley has put her foot in but good this time, and it has nothing to do with Star Wars: THe Rise of Skywalker, except by association.
In a recent interview published in The Guardian, she insinuated that her upper-class upbringing created the same experience growing up as her cast-mate John Boyega, who grew up in council flats in South London after immigrating from Nigeria.
For those of you who don’t know the lingo, ‘council flats’ in England are the equivalent to ‘public housing’ in North America.
England is all about class and wealth divisions and even if you try and lie about where you’re from your accent will surely give you away.
In her defense, I don’t think she was comparing her life experience to John Boyega’s rather their experience as actors.
This is more of a case of what happens when the dim go off-script.
From The Guardian interview with Nosheen Iqbal:
“I ask if she thinks it has been easier to be confident and navigate her celebrity because of the privilege in her life – of boarding school, her upbringing and so on? Ridley is suddenly incredulous.” (and responds) “The privilege I have – how? No, genuinely, how?”
She insists that, actually, there is little difference between her experience and that of her co-star John Boyega, who grew up in south London to British Nigerian immigrant parents.
“John grew up on a council estate in Peckham and I think me and him are similar enough that… no.”
So here are some facts about Ms. Daisy Ridley’s origins:
Where?
She grew up in Maida Vale which is an affluent residential district in West London with many large late Victorian and Edwardian blocks of mansion flats.
Her neighbors at one time would have included Sir Alec Guinness, Dame Joan Collins, Michael Flatley, and Alan Turing.
How she get such fancy digs?
Old money. She was born to Louise Fawkner-Corbett, a banker, and Christopher Ridley, a photographer. Her mother’s family, the Fawkner-Corbetts, were landed gentry (read: Aristocrats) with a military and medical background.
Her great-uncle was Dad’s Army actor and playwright Arnold Ridley; his brother, Daisy’s grandfather, John Harry Dunn Ridley, O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire, usually bestowed by the Queen) was head of the Engineering Secretariat at the B.B.C. from 1950 to 1965.
As for John Boyega…
His, mother works with the disabled, his father is a Pentecostal Minister and Peckham is a working-class melting pot and quite less than affluent.
And Then She Doubled Down
But she’s quick to defend her so-called privileged upbringing with:
“Also,” she adds, “I went to a boarding school for performing arts, which was different.”
Sigh. Oh, Daisy.
Privilege is not a bad thing but to not recognize that it is an actual “thing” or “condition” is really quite douchey.
In America, class and privilege haven’t been as tightly bound together in the public imagination in the way they are in Europe and much of the rest of the world.
At least until recently.
And in a country where Bill Gates and the homeless guy on the street still both think they’re middle-class–no matter what the woke Twitterati would have you believe–Ms. Ridley’s comments don’t ring out much, but everywhere else in the world, she’s getting run through the wringer.
