News’s Tyler Treese spoke with We Bury the Dead star Daisy Ridley about her new zombie movie. Ridley discussed her character’s hopefulness, the uniqueness of her projects, and how she approaches nonverbal scenes. We Bury the Dead is out in theaters on January 2, 2026.
“After a catastrophic American military experiment, resulting in mass casualties across Tasmania. Ava (Ridley) joins a body retrieval unit to help identify the dead and search for her husband in the southern part of the island,” reads the official synopsis. “As Ava makes her way south, across the ravaged landscape, she soon learns that some of the victims of the disaster are coming back to life.”
Tyler Treese: Daisy, I’ve been really impressed by your project selection lately. You don’t stray away from genre, but you still find these movies that have very interesting themes to them. Just Daisy Ridley vs. Zombies would’ve sold me. But this is much more contemplative and a more thoughtful version of that. Can you speak to just your project selection and what it was about We Bury the Dead that really spoke to you?
Daisy Ridley: I’m always drawn in by the script, and then I feel honestly really lucky that I’m sent such a wide variety of things because then I’ve been able to do all sorts of different things and explore stories in different genres. This certainly was something that I hilariously sort of didn’t realize that there were that many zombies in it. I just thought Ava’s story was so beautiful, and I really understood her and the humanity of what she’s going through, and then got to set, I was like, “Oh, the zombies.”
But I think what Zak has done is so wonderful and really the zombies a representative of her journey. They’re caught somewhere in between. They have unfinished business. There’s something they feel they need to attend to before they’re able to move on, much like Ava, and she’s so driven by the hope, the hope that maybe she’ll find her husband, and then the hope that if he is a zombie, they’ll there will be something they can do to bring him back. So that was really wonderful exploring.
She is laden with grief and laden with the difficulties that her and her husband have faced, but she’s also hopeful and driven by love and what might be waiting for her.
There’s some action later on, but I found some of the most haunting scenes were just when the dead are just standing there, and the lights are off the first time you see them. Obviously, the makeup’s great and the actor was great, but just your reaction is very striking. Can you speak to when you have to do a nonverbal performance? Because that’s just as impactful as seeing this reanimated corpse.
Daisy Ridley: What’s interesting is I think a lot of the characters that Ava meets early are very sort of cut and dry with the zombies because they have to be the people that are in the body retrieval unit. There’s a sort of reality you have to face in what you are doing. But Ava is really meeting it with curiosity. Her interest is piqued by the idea that we dunno what’s happened. There might be a way to bring them back.
So certainly when we meet the first, the oily guy in the garage, his performance was so fantastic, but I remember being so drawn in because of that, the curiosity of what it is that this person’s doing and not feeling like the fear was overtaking that. That continued for the next few zombies she meets.
There’s so much curiosity in that, and actually not that much fear, because for the most part, they seem okay. Then, of course, as time goes on, things change. But that was really, I think playing someone who is curious and is hopeful. There’s a different sort of response to what might be frightening in another version of events.
Thanks to Daisy Ridley for speaking about We Bury the Dead.
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