Daisy Ridley on We Bury the Dead: Grief, Humanity, and Finding Life in the In-Between
On the surface, We Bury the Dead may resemble a zombie film, but as Daisy Ridley is quick to point out, that label barely scratches the surface. Directed by Zak Hilditch, the film is a deeply intimate meditation on grief, loss, and the quiet, often uncomfortable spaces people inhabit when life doesn’t offer closure.
Ridley stars as Ava, a woman navigating a post catastrophe world while searching for her missing husband. Zombies exist in this landscape, but they are not the point. “I genuinely didn’t remember really reading about that many zombies in the script,” Ridley admits. “For me, it was so much her very human story, how far she was willing to go just to get an answer, just to say goodbye.”
One of the most striking aspects of Ava is how layered her grief is. It isn’t only about losing a partner, it’s about mourning a future that will never happen. Ridley speaks candidly about how Ava’s emotional journey was shaped by ideas of fertility, shame, and unspoken regret.
“It’s not just her marriage,” Ridley explains. “It’s the idea of what that life would have been. The idea of what their children might have been.” At the time of filming, Ridley knew people going through IVF, which gave her an added emotional reference point. Ava’s grief is compounded by guilt, she knows she made decisions within her marriage that cannot be undone, and that weight informs every step of her journey.
Rather than playing Ava as constantly overwhelmed, Ridley was conscious of pacing that emotional toll. “She couldn’t be in that state all the time,” she says. “It’s an hour and a half, you can’t watch someone be at that level the whole time.” Instead, Ava adapts. She becomes functional in the midst of horror, capable of going into homes, removing bodies, and continuing on, because survival demands it.
What makes We Buried the Dead especially haunting is Ava’s relationship to the zombies themselves. Ridley approaches them not with immediate terror, but with curiosity and compassion. “She meets the zombies from a place of curiosity instead of fear,” Ridley explains. “They’re just existing in this space stuck between one moment and the next.”
That liminal state mirrors Ava’s own emotional reality. She, too, is suspended between knowing and not knowing, between holding onto hope and accepting inevitability. The film reinforces this parallel visually, often intercutting Ava’s memories of her marriage with her encounters among the dead.
As the threats escalate, Ava’s reactions shift from fear, to instinct, to raw anger. Ridley recalls questioning one particularly violent moment in the script, only to realize it reflected something deeply human. “Just because we feel a resolution doesn’t mean it’s over,” she says. “She’s got that anger. It’s there.”
Midway through the film, Ava encounters Riley, played by Mark Coles Smith, in what becomes one of the movie’s most unsettling sequences. Unlike the zombies, Riley represents a very real and familiar danger: another living person who has processed grief in a radically different way.
Ridley describes Riley as the most frightening force Ava faces. “The fear comes from the fact that Ava understands why he is the way he is,” she explains. “That certainty that nothing will deter him that’s the most frightening thing in people.”
The sequence is charged with physical and emotional tension, especially as Ava is forced into moments of false intimacy. Ridley reflects on how disturbingly familiar that discomfort felt. “It made me think about all the small compromises women make just to not feel in danger,” she says. “That’s honestly the lived reality.”
Through Ava, she explores grief not as something to conquer, but as something to carry, an experience that reshapes how we see the living, the dead, and ourselves in between.
Watch the full conversation below:
Q&A on the film We Bury the Dead with actor Daisy Ridley. Moderated by Mara Webster, In Creative Company.
