Audiences might know Daisy Ridley best as Rey in the Star Wars sequels, but Ridley’s 2025 action film Cleaner is becoming a very popular streaming success on HBO Max. Per Flix Patrol, Cleaner stands as the most popular movie on HBO Max at writing, beating out blockbusters like How to Train Your Dragon, Bullet Train, Space Balls, and three of The Hunger Games movies. In all, Cleaner‘s streaming popularity in HBO Max is impressive, especially with the relatively low key release it had earlier this year.

Directed by Martin Campbell, Cleaner focuses on Joey Locke (Ridley), a former soldier who works as a high-rise window cleaner. During a gala event in London’s One Canada Square, a radical environmental group led by Clive Owen’s psychotic Marcus Blake seizes control of the building, intent on exposing the company’s environmentally damaging practices. With the entire building’s population held hostage, Joey becomes the only hope of rescuing the 300 hostages, which includes her brother Michael (Matthew Tuck).

Martin Campbell has a long history working in the action genre, Campbell famously helming not one but two James Bond movies, namely 1995’s Goldeneye and 2006’s Casino Royale, which respectively introduced Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig’s 007’s to the world. Campbell also directed the 1998 hit The Mask of Zorro and its 2005 sequel The Legend of Zorro, along with 2000’s mountain adventure Vertical Limit and 2017’s Jackie Chan-led The Foreigner, among other action films. With The Cleaner, the Daisy Ridley-led actioner effectively serves as Campbell’s foray into a Die Hard-style action film.

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Die Hard-esque action films are practically their own sub-genre, following the general template of 1998’s Die Hard of a terrorist group taking control of a singular location, with a lone protagonist being the only chance of stopping them. Popular action films following the Die Hard template include Under Siege, Cliffhanger, Speed, Air Force One, The Rock, Skyscraper, and numerous others. Cleaner puts its own spin on the Die Hard formula with a somewhat grey moral structure in the corporation’s genuinely harmful environmental practices (contrasting against their public push for renewable energy) and the over-the-line methods of the movie’s terrorist group under Blake’s leadership.

While Daisy Ridley’s portrayal of Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy made her a household name, Ridley has stayed busy with other projects like Murder on the Orient Express, Ophelia, and The Marsh King’s Daughter, and garnered acclaim for her versatility as an actress. Outside of the Star Wars franchise, Cleaner is Ridley’s first real dive into action movies, and she clearly put in a great deal of commitment and training for the movie’s plentiful fight sequences, gunplay, and stunt work.

While Cleaner debuted rather quietly earlier in 2025, its popularity on HBO Max shows how much its audience is growing. Such is frequently the nature of streaming-based releases (or streaming releases with limited theatrical runs, in the case of Cleaner), which often accrue popularity gradually but steadily. With Cleaner really breaking out on HBO Max, the success of the Die Hard-esque action movie could possibly signal Daisy Ridley having a long future in action movies, with audiences coming to know her as just as compelling an action movie screen presence without a Lightsaber by her side.

Cleaner is now available to stream on HBO Max, and the Star Wars movies are all available to stream on Disney+.