Daisy Ridley Teases 'Star Wars: Episode VIII' With Some Fresh Lightsaber Skills

Yoda, sadly, was not the teacher.

April 26, 2016

Now that Star War: The Force Awakens is readily available for at-home consumption, we can all return to our regularly scheduled lives without caring about the forthcoming sequels and spin-offs. Right? Wrong. So very, very wrong. The Force Awakens star Daisy Ridley knows this as well as anyone, taking her hype-conjuring abilities to Instagram to share a very promising (and possibly Jedi-related) development:

Ridley's teacher, in an unlikely twist, is actually a stormtrooper. Liang Yang portrayed FN-2199 in The Force Awakens, even helping with the coordination of the obvious blockbuster's fight scene blocking. "Our stunt team are the most incredible group of people," Ridley said of the Star Wars crew. "So lucky I get to train with them!" Though the moves are actually part of a wushu martial arts routine, imagining their use in some general lightsabering is probably a sensible thing to do. So what, exactly, should fans expect in terms of well-orchestrated fight and battle sequences in Star Wars: Episode VIII?

"[Director Rian Johnson] is definitely going to places and investigating things that haven't really been done in the Star Wars universe," star Oscar Isaactold the Los Angeles Times earlier this month. "For me, it's so fun getting to explore different things that I wouldn't have expected in this universe." In fact, at least according to Isaac, the Episode VIII vibes are very different indeed. "In some ways it feels like we're making an independent film," the Ex Machina star added. "Certain things we get to play with—this kind of intimacy that we get to find—it's special." As this is Star Wars we're talking about, we likely won't know anything more before the film hits theaters on Dec. 15, 2017.