Here’s a followup to that riff last Saturday about Daisy Ridley’s Interview q & a with Carrie Fisher, and particularly a portion in which Ridley indicated she knew next to nothing (if that) about Cary Grant. (Fisher said, “Cary Grant! Do you know who that is?” and Ridley said, “Maybe I could appreciate the old-school film stars more.”) To me that sounded like she was saying, “Well, rather than admit ignorance about any one actor living or dead it might be more diplomatic to just say I could stand to brush up on classic movies a bit more.”
Not long after the 10.31 piece posted, a Force Awakens guy wrote and said, “Dude…DUDE! Of course Daisy knows who Cary Grant is! Hah…you kidding me?” And I wrote back saying “fine but I can be forgiven as her answer to Carrie clearly indicated otherwise. Carrie asked her point blank ‘do you know who that is?’ and she didn’t answer with a clear affirmative. If she does know who Grant was I’d say she knows him like she knows Archimedes or Nicolaus Copernicus or Galileo.” His response: “I know Daisy and she’s no Hollywood neophyte.”
He later added that Daisy has said that the editing of the Interview transcript removed a word or two that made her seem more ignorant of Grant’s reputation than she actually is. So to be thorough I spoke earlier today with Interview‘s entertainment director Randi Peck, and she said that the only thing they took out of Daisy’s comments were the “uhms” and “aahs.” Othwerwise everything that she said was printed verbatim. So there wasn’t, she said, anything else that she said about Grant that suggested she was more familiar with him than the transcript indicated.