Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis Presley, has carved her own path in Hollywood, establishing herself as a talented actress, producer, and director. This article explores her perspectives on diet, exercise, and the unique experiences that have shaped her life.
Aversion to Dinners and Alcohol
In an interview, Keough expressed her dislike for dinners, viewing them as a "waste of time." She enjoys eating but finds the whole experience of choosing a restaurant and sitting at a table tedious. Similarly, she doesn't enjoy drinking, stating that it makes it difficult for her to function, especially with a busy schedule and multiple projects. "I drank some wine,” she shrugs. “But I don’t like drinking, really. I have so much to do and it’s hard to function with a hangover.” She thinks for a moment. “Actually, I don’t like dinners either. Such a waste of time. I like eating, but I don’t like that it’s this whole experience, like picking a restaurant and going there and like sitting at a table…”
Work Ethic and a Packed Schedule
Keough describes herself as a "workaholic" and is very busy with numerous film projects. In 2017, she had six movies coming out. She starred in The Runaways in 2010 with Dakota Fanning, then she landed a part in Mad Max: Fury Road alongside Zoë Kravitz and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Her role in The Girlfriend Experience garnered critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination. Today, we’re meant to be talking about Logan Lucky (out this month), one of five films she has coming out this year.
Southern Roots and a Unique Upbringing
Despite being a "Cali Valley girl," Keough has family in the South, particularly in Memphis, on Graceland Avenue. She grew up between the Graceland Estate and the Neverland Ranch, experiencing a childhood that was far from ordinary. She'd be hanging out with Michael Jackson and his llamas one minute, and travelling to school with an armed security detail the next. Not to mention Lisa Marie’s Scientology (she’s no longer a member), or the Nicolas Cage marriage that lasted a full 108 days. And yet, by some miracle, she seems perfectly sane. I suggest gently that she’s not quite how I expected her to be, and she grins. “I think I’ve had a more complex life than people are aware of.”
Presley Legacy
Keough doesn't mind being referred to as Elvis's granddaughter. "Why should I? It's a fact. And I'm not ashamed of that in any way." However, she never knew him personally, as he passed away 12 years before she was born. She just knew that he was “very, very famous. I knew the situation. I just didn’t really think about it that much.”
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Family Dynamics
Keough grew up the eldest of four between California Valley and Hawaii, travelling back and forth. Her father, Danny, was a bass player in Lisa Marie’s band, but they divorced when Keough was six. Twenty days later, Lisa Marie married Michael Jackson, who had recently been accused of child abuse. That lasted two years, during which time Keough was the perfect age to enjoy Neverland. And after that, her life was split between Danny and Lisa Marie.
She acknowledges the contrasting lifestyles she experienced growing up. "I grew up very privileged with my mother,” she says. “But my dad didn’t live like that. And I think experiencing both sides has been helpful. My father had mattresses on the floor of his apartments. He lived in cabins and trailer parks. He just didn’t have much money.” Did she ever think, “Ugh, do I have to go back to Dad’s again?”“Actually, my memories of growing up with him were so colourful and eccentric and fun. It was a good vibe, you know? When I was like eight I told him, ‘I want to grow up and be poor like you!’ He was eating a bowl of cereal. I didn’t realise how wildly offensive that was!”
Education and Artistic Pursuits
Keough attended a regular school for a while, but the constant security made it difficult. She was home-schooled, which made more sense, particularly with all her travelling. Besides, she never liked school. “I had like a bad reaction to authority, like mean teachers, or just a rude movie ticket person - anyone abusing their power. It really irritated me. So I was like super-shy but still kind of strong in myself. I was weird.”
An artistic career was the natural choice. Her family would have been alarmed if she had chosen to become a lawyer. But they were musicians, not actors, and music wasn’t her thing. “I played piano but I’m not particularly gifted. Movies felt endless to me, whereas music I could see myself getting bored of.”
She took to writing and directing films at home, casting her friends and bossing them about. “I was pretty hardcore. I made my friends cry because I wanted the tears to be authentic. But it was mostly horror. Once I discovered that ketchup could be blood, things went downhill from there.”
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Acting Aspirations
Keough's ambitions took a turn in her tweens. “I know people say like, ‘Oh I saw Alfred Hitchcock, or Citizen Kane but, for me, it was The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys with Emile Hirsch. And Moulin Rouge. I was 12 and I was like, ‘Wow, I want to be Nicole Kidman, she made me feel so sad!’ I remember thinking how fulfilling it would be to do that, which is a big concept for a kid.”
Her attentions now turned to acting, she began talking to herself, pretending to be distraught, delighted, terrified. She made herself cry in front of the mirror. “That’s like the first sign that your child is going to be an actor. Is she crying in front of the mirror? The second one is: is she emotionally unstable?” It wasn’t attention she wanted. During a performance of Winnie the Pooh, she came on stage as Roo, took one look at the crowd and ran off in tears. “I thought you had to be super-confident to be an actor. But you don’t. You just have to be super fucked up!”
Overcoming Challenges
If she has a regret from that time, it’s dropping out of high school. All the moving around meant she came to see herself as unacademic. That coupled with her inner anti-authoritarian and she just bailed, becoming the only one of her siblings not to finish. Her parents didn’t stop her. “They couldn’t say, ‘You need your diploma,’ because I booked my first audition really quickly. But with hindsight it was stupid. High school is important.”
She acknowledges that being a Presley helped her get ahead. “It’s been a huge help,” she says. “I’m very privileged. Like the normal story of moving to LA and it takes you three years to find an agent? I got one in a week.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. After The Runaways she didn’t work for two years, and went through the usual trauma of auditions and rejection. But, she says, “Rejection just makes me work harder to prove myself.” And so came Mad Max, and then The Girlfriend Experience, a gamechanger.
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Marriage and Family Values
Just for the record, Keough’s Tinder window is closed now, if it was ever open in the first place. She married Ben Smith-Petersen, an Australian stuntman in 2015, at the age of 25: young by modern standards, though Keough is old-fashioned in some ways. One of the things she loves about the South, for instance, is their staunch family values.
“My mom had me at 21, and her mom had her at 21, so I think 25 is old,” she laughs. “Marriage is just something I wanted to experience in my lifetime, to be honest with you. But the older I get, the less urgent it feels to have a kid. Not to be too grim, but the world is in a weird place, so I’m kind of torn on whether to bring a child in, or to adopt. Like morally.”
Current Life and Future Projects
In the meantime, the life of Riley is a simple one. She lives in LA, walks her dogs and works on a hush-hush movie project with her writing partner that she might direct or not, she won’t say. Every couple of months she jets off to make movies, and then there are interviews like this one to do for all the movies she’s got coming out. Like the LA crime thriller starring Andrew Garfield later this year, the family drama with Catherine Keener, a project with Joel Edgerton…
“I don’t like talking about myself though,” she says. “I don’t like attention. Which is weird in this career.” And she recognises the irony. She smiles. Isn’t life curious?
Incident with Andrew Garfield
“I was in the makeup trailer and I was eating like a granola bar or something,” recalled Keough. “She got the producer who’s a friend of mine and the producer came in and was like ‘Riley like Andrew is very allergic to peanuts and we had to shut the set down,'” laughs Keough. “I was just kinda like, ‘Oh, f - - k, that’s crazy,'” said the actress. According to the “Mad Max: Fury Road” star, the woman bolted from the trailer and went to find a producer. The film premiered in 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or award and Garfield was nominated for Best Actor.
Coping with the Pandemic
And Riley Keough has been making then most of her time at home amid the coronavirus pandemic as she shared a series of adorable snaps working out with her pet pooch. The granddaughter of Elvis Presley, 30, looked in good spirits as she relaxed with her dog Scrubs in her garden, enjoying the sunshine on a yoga mat. The actress displayed her sensational physique in a white crop top and a pair of black leggings. Styling her brunette locks into an updo, Riley completed her look for the day with a gold necklace. Alongside the sweet snaps, The Girlfriend Experience star wrote: 'My sweet angel dog. Thank god for you'.
Riley took to her Instagram Stories and wrote a message saying she hopes the COVID-19 crisis will give people a 'new perspective' on life when it is over. She wrote: 'I'm really praying that when this is over humans learn lessons and walk away from this with a new perspective… Or learn to be kind to one another and take care of our planet.'Or understand there's a power bigger than us and there are more important things than our immediate lifetime. 'It would be a shame if people just went back to cutting people off on the freeway, denying healthcare for all, being racist and sexist and throwing plastic in the trash.'
Career Highlights
Despite her famous family being known for their musical talents, Riley pursued a career in acting and made her debut in The Runaways alongside Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning in 2010. Two years later she starred in Magic Mike, and it was during that year she met her now husband, stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen while she was filming for Mad Max: Fury Road - which was released in 2015. 2016 was an incredible year for Riley as she starred in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, followed by the American Honey. Daisy Jones & the Six propelled her to stardom even as she navigated tragedies, new motherhood, and a legal struggle with Priscilla.
Graceland Memories
Her grandfather died before she was born, but his house in Memphis stayed in the family. Graceland. Years ago, Riley Keough and her mom, Lisa Marie Presley, would visit for Thanksgiving with Keough’s brother and sisters. They would stay at the official hotel, and when the tourists departed the legendary home for the day, they’d go over and hang out, drive golf carts around the grounds, and celebrate the season together. “When Elvis’s chefs were alive, they used to still cook dinner for us, which was really special,” she tells me. “It was very Southern: greens and fried catfish and fried chicken and hush puppies. Cornbread and beans. Banana pudding.”
“There were a few times that we slept there,” Keough says of Graceland, “but I don’t know if I should say that.” She pauses. The second floor has always been closed to the public out of respect for Elvis Presley’s family because the singer had a fatal heart attack there. Then again, Keough’s family was Presley’s family. Who had the right to be there if not them? “The tours would start in the morning, and we would hide upstairs until they were over,” she continues. “The security would bring us breakfast. It’s actually such a great memory. We would order sausage and biscuits, and hide until the tourists finished.”
Recent Challenges and Triumphs
Life has thrown a lot at her in short order, some of it joyous, some of it obliterating: the death of her brother, by suicide, in 2020. The birth of her and her husband’s daughter in 2022. The death of her mother, following complications of prior weight-loss surgery, early this year. The debut of her star-making ’70s rock series, Daisy Jones & the Six, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. A surprising legal fight with her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, over Lisa Marie’s estate and hence Graceland, as well as the family’s interest in Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Keough is now the sole custodian of Graceland and the family shares of Elvis Presley Enterprises, all of which were worth just $5 million at the time of Elvis’s death and are now reportedly in the neighborhood of $500 million. She’s also a rising star, producer, and director: The award at Cannes was for the drama War Pony, which she codirected with Gina Gammell, about two Lakota boys on a reservation in South Dakota. Everything that happened to Keough this year, good and bad, happened in full public view-and will continue to.
Lyme Disease Diagnosis
“I have Lyme disease,” Keough says. She pulls her long hair, still damp from the shower, away from her bare face. “I used this little break that I have to come and try and see if I can alleviate it a bit. It’s a holistic treatment center and offers all kinds of things that you can’t really do in America yet, like cleaning your blood.” She’s never addressed Lyme in detail before.
This past week, Keough wrapped production in Vancouver on a miniseries she’s producing and starring in for Hulu (Under the Bridge), appeared in Mexico City at Dior’s 2024 cruise show, and celebrated the launch of a new Cartier jewelry collection in Florence. She’s also been shepherding new projects at her and Gammell’s production company, Felix Culpa. And here she is in Switzerland, doing an interview with me after eight hours of uncomfortable treatment-on her birthday.
Work Ethic
I ask where she thinks she got her work ethic from. “Not from my parents,” she says. Her father is the musician Danny Keough. “Not from anyone in my family. I came out of the womb like that.” Keough’s wearing a smocked shirt, blue jeans, and Charvet slippers. She takes off the slippers and digs her toes into the grass. “I think we’re half nature, half nurture. I was naturally somebody that was very punctual and hardworking and wanted to do things. My upbringing was very different to that. It was very no-schedule: Sometimes we go to school, sometimes we don’t. That was what I was used to, so I was living out my teen and childhood years as though that was what I wanted. I’m definitely an adventurous and spontaneous person, but I thrive on routine. My parents said when I was little, I was very much trying to organize things and make things happen.”
Early Life and Family
Keough made the cover of People when there was still a pacifier in her mouth. She was born in 1989 in Santa Monica, and her mom posed with her alongside the cover line: “Elvis’s first grandchild. HERE SHE IS!” The magazine reportedly paid $300,000 for the exclusive. Keough’s father is Irish and Ashkenazi Jewish. Her mother was Scottish, Irish, Norwegian, Indigenous, and “very hillbilly.” As for herself, Keough says, “I’m an American girl.”
This particular American girl’s parents met while mom was living at the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre in LA. (Lisa Marie and Priscilla joined after Elvis’s death.) Keough was raised in the church, but the family reportedly left it in 2014. “I grew up with my dad reading tarot card books and metaphysics,” she tells me. “He’s very spiritual. I’m very spiritual. ‘Faith’ is a loaded word for people, but I think faith is faith in anything-faith in love, humanity, the universe, whatever it is. I don’t go to church, but I was always able to identify that spirituality was something that I really needed in my life.” Her family split their time between California, Florida, and Hawaii. Keough’s late brother, Benjamin Storm Keough, was born in 1992. Around this time, Keough’s already unusual childhood sloughed off any remaining resemblance to normality.
In 1993, Michael Jackson was accused of sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy. He turned to his close friend Lisa Marie for support. A year later, after Jackson had settled with the boy’s family for a reported $20 million, he proposed to her. She separated from Danny Keough, and 20 days later, she and Jackson eloped to the Dominican Republic. The media suspected the marriage was a publicity stunt to rehabilitate Jackson’s reputation, but Lisa Marie denied it: “I am very much in love with Michael. I dedicate my life to being his wife.” Jackson’s addiction to pills has since been cited as the reason the marriage dissolved a year and a half later.
“My whole childhood was probably very extreme,” Keough says. She breaks the tension with one of her big, guttural laughs. “In hindsight, I can see how crazy these things would be to somebody from the outside. But when you’re living in them, it’s just your life and your family. You just remember the love, and I had real love for Michael.” Keough was obviously too young to be aware of the accusations swirling around Jackson, so her memories are often idyllic, like the time the singer shut down a toy store in Paris-maybe it was London?-when she needed a teddy bear. “I think he really got a kick out of being able to make people happy, in the most epic way possible, which I think he and my grandfather had in common.”
I point out the surreal fact that Keough has called both Graceland and Neverland home. “Which one did I like better?” she wonders aloud. “I spent more time at Neverland than Graceland, to be honest. That was a real home, whereas Graceland was a museum in my lifetime.”
After Lisa Marie and Jackson split, she married Nicolas Cage. Four months later, they separated. Keough doesn’t keep in touch with Cage, but says she’d be game to do a movie with him. “He’s a great actor,” she says. “I’ve had some wild stepfathers. Famous and not famous.” She steers the conversation back to Danny Keough, whose humble lifestyle had a grounding effect when she was young.
Lisa Marie’s base was Calabasas, California, a town now globally known thanks to the Kardashians. The gated community, Hidden Hills, has been home to Madonna, Will Smith, Drake, Miley Cyrus, and more. “I think when we lived there, it was just us and Melissa Etheridge-it was horse country,” says Keough. “I’m an OG Calabasas girl.” The Kardashians were there too, but this was long before the show. “My grandma dated their dad, I think?” Keough says. “Fact-check that.”
She’s right. Priscilla dated Robert Kardashian after her divorce from Elvis in 1973. She refused to marry him while Elvis was still alive, so they parted ways. In 2014, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West bought the property where Keough’s childhood home once stood. The original house had been demolished and a bigger one built. West enlisted Axel Vervoordt to design the family compound where Kim lives now.
Modeling Career and Friendships
At 14, Keough began modeling. She was a catwalk mainstay for a few seasons and notched a Vogue cover with Mom and Grandma, as well as a Miss Dior campaign. Through it all, her friend group has remained consistent, with Dakota Johnson, Zoë Kravitz, and Kristen Stewart among her nearest and dearest. All three describe Keough as graceful, humble, and fearless-and, for the record, they don’t seem to have strategized in a group text beforehand. They’re incredulous at the strength she’s displayed over the past three years (“I would do anything to take her pain away,” says Johnson). And they note that Keough’s quietness makes you lean in and pay attention, both onscreen and off. She’s delicate, they say, not to be confused with weak.
Kravitz and Keough were breast-fed in close proximity because their moms were friends, and somewhere there’s VHS tape of them running around a three-year-old’s birthday party together, but it was a chance New Year’s bash at 16 that bonded them for life. “I think consistency is the thing that I’ve always appreciated about Riley,” Kravitz says. “No matter what situation we’re in, no matter what crowd we’re in, she’s the same person. I’ve never questioned her integrity.”