Daisy Ridley & Taz Skylar Elevate the 'Cleaner'

If you haven’t been paying attention to Daisy Ridley’s career since she last played Rey in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, then you’ve missed out on the joy of watching the actress prove her talents in a series of really interesting roles in a variety of genres. In 2024 alone, she did award-worthy work embodying polar opposites, first as Olympian swimmer Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle in the underrated biopic Young Woman and the Sea and then as the cuckolded wife Annette in Magpie (in which she also came up with the story).

To start 2025, she’s embracing her inner action heroine again to great effect in director Martin Campbell’s (Casino Royale) contemporary Die Hard riff, Cleaner. Set in London, Ridley plays Joey Locke, a former British Army soldier whose current existence is perennially on the back foot. Chronically late and scattered, she tries to make ends meet as a high-rise window washer, but that often butts up against the chaos of caretaking emergencies involving her adult autistic brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck).

On probation at work, Joey is forced to bring him with her to sit through her shift in the lobby as she’s needed to make the Agnian Energy floor of windows extra sparkly for the company’s annual gala that evening. A normal day hanging from the exterior of the building with a squeegee turns into a waking nightmare when the big party is invaded by a group of extreme environmentalists led by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) and his crew of like-minded disruptors. They’ve set their sights on bringing down the Miltons, the distasteful Agnian co-owners Geoffrey (Rufus Jones) and Gerald (Lee Boardman), along with their guest list of powerful corrupt enablers hiding the company’s environmental crimes.