Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Seeing herself on a gigantic Times Square billboard is one thing. But a yogurt cup?

Such is life right now for Daisy Ridley, the British actress who’s about to go very global as the lead in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (in theaters Friday) and a woman seemingly as comfortable piloting the Millennium Falcon as that scruffy old nerfherder Harrison Ford. (No word yet on if her character Rey can do the Kessel Run in less than Han Solo's record of 12 parsecs.)

Ridley, 23, is just starting to grasp how big this whole saga is on a worldwide scale, something she didn’t realize when she was filming the blockbuster-in-waiting.

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“I’m glad I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, because I think that would be quite a lot of pressure,” she says. “I know it sounds cringe-y but I was really just trying to do a good job and I wasn’t thinking so much. And it didn’t feel like we were part of a huge thing.”

Ridley's Rey is a scavenger on the desert planet Jakku who was left there when she was 5 and now waits for someone, maybe even her family, to come get her. When a little droid named BB-8 and an AWOL Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) blast into her life, things get more interesting, and she’s catapulted headfirst into a world of lightsaber-wielding Jedi and the oppressive First Order that to her has been only the stuff of myth and legend.

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“She’s so open to meet new people and do new things, which is a wonderful trait,” Ridley says. “She’s definitely cooler than I am.” (She won’t have to wait long to get back to her — Ridley begins filming writer/director Rian Johnson’sStar Wars: Episode VIII in January.)

The Force Awakens is her first feature film; Americans probably have only seen the native Londoner in small roles in British shows such as Mr. Selfridge. Still, “she carries this,” says Ridley’s co-star Carrie Fisher, who has been the stalwart ranking Star Wars female cast member since the original 1977 film.

“I told Daisy not to sleep with a lot of people because they’ll be able to say, ‘I slept with that girl from Star Wars,’ ” Fisher half-jokes. But what actual advice she did give Ridley was more for real life: “Daisy’s a really, really good actress and she’s sane. I can’t compare myself to her at all.”

Being Rey has brought the shy Ridley out of her shell, and she says her personal story has mimicked her character’s in many ways.

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“She’s reaching new possibilities and finding out new things about herself, and I felt like that as well,” Ridley says. “Obviously, there were always moments of like, ‘Ahhh! Oh, my God, what am I doing?’ But just to be given a voice, for people to care about what you have to say — not just in a script, but the inbetween-y times when you’re standing around waiting for a camera to be changed or something — is quite wonderful.”