How Riley Keough Is Turning The Page
Photographs by Olivia Malone; Styling by Natasha Wray
On the final day of Paris Fashion Week this October, Chanel returned to its historic show venue, the Grand Palais, for the first time in four years. In the middle of the sprawling Belle Epoque space stood a giant birdcage, models weaving their way through it. For the show’s finale, actor Riley Keough emerged, a cape the colour of midnight fluttering behind her. Singing Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’, she perched on a swing in the centre of the cage as it gradually rose high above the models – all eyes and iPhones trained on her.
Although relatively pared-back as far as a Chanel mise-en-scène goes (the maison has previously transformed the Grand Palais into a supermarket, a forest, polar ice cap and ancient Greece) the vignette was a perfectly composed metaphor for Keough’s life: glamorous, big, surreal, in the middle of everything but separate from it, with an undercurrent of sadness (‘How can you just leave me standing, alone in a world that’s so cold?’).
When we spoke, a few days earlier, Keough gave nothing away. ‘Well, you will see me, I’ll tell you that,’ was all she teased about her plans to attend the show, adding that she probably wouldn’t be able to say hi. It was 8am in Barcelona, where she had started filming Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning the day before, when she Zoomed from her hotel suite. Sitting on her bed in a white T-shirt and no make-up, it was quiet – daughter Tupelo asleep next door, husband Ben Smith-Petersen and her mother-in-law nearby.
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Tupelo is named after the Mississippi city where Keough’s maternal grandfather, Elvis Presley, was born. Although he died 12 years before Keough came along, his is the kind of demi-god fame that shapes generations. To be a Presley is to be a Kennedy, or latterly a Kardashian (don’t @me), part of a dynasty enshrined in the cultural history of America.
As the eldest daughter of Elvis’s only child – Lisa Marie Presley – Keough was, like her mother, born famous; she landed her first magazine cover at a month old, an exclusive that People magazine paid $300,000 for: ‘Elvis’s first grandchild. HERE SHE IS!’ emblazoned next to the newborn.
A new memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown – co-written by Lisa Marie and Keough – gives unique, intimate insight into the idiosyncrasies of growing up Presley, with all its absurdities (Lisa Marie free-roaming around Graceland; Riley waking up to see a giraffe outside the window of her Neverland room) and surprising normalities (Elvis at a parent-teacher conference; the envies and insecurities that are a part of being human, whatever your status). A lot of it is comedic, much of it tragic – as life is. It charts Lisa Marie’s time at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, her addiction battles, marriages and the world-crushing loss of her son – Keough’s younger brother – Benjamin, in 2020. It is, as Keough writes, ‘a human story in what I know is an extraordinary circumstance’.
The book was never supposed to be co-written by mother and daughter. Lisa Marie was working on it when she died in 2023. With a pragmatism that many will recognise from early grief, shortly after the loss of her mother, Keough went ‘into this mode of needing to handle everything that’s not completed, and the book was part of that. There are all these things that are left undone when a person leaves, when they pass away. How could I not finish it for her?’ she says. ‘It felt more like a duty, I suppose. I just felt like something drove me to complete it for her.’
In the wake of the loss of a loved one, we often become archaeologists of their lives. Keough tells me about being sent videos and photos and demos and shoots, as well as the hours of taped inter- views and musings her mother was recording for the book.
Considering how well-documented Lisa Marie’s life was, and how guileless she was with her daughter, did Keough discover anything about her which was surprising? ‘My mom was – no pun intended – a very open book!’ she says, laughing. ‘But I think what was really the most interesting to me were the details in these stories that I knew, the broad strokes. To have all the details, how she felt in these moments, was really special. I love stories and storytelling, so I love the nuance. I think that was the coolest thing’.
She took the privilege of the access to the tapes seriously, and set about telling her story for herself, honouring her mother and making her – finally! – into ‘a three-dimensional character’.
Keough succeeds. Beyond the headlines of her mother’s life there emerges a sensitive, gentle but not whitewashed portrait of a woman who is kind, intuitive, insecure, funny as hell, generous, flawed, loyal, fiercely loving. But there is also an unshakeable sense of loneliness. ‘I think that, in her case, which isn’t always the case, being the daughter of someone that famous and iconic made it really hard for her to try and have a career, but also to be a person away from that at all. Her entire identity was being Elvis’s daughter. And she happened to be someone who didn’t enjoy these things; the fame and attention on her,’ says Keough, later adding: ‘The most heartbreaking thing for me, growing up, was to watch this woman who I could tell so deeply wanted love and friendship, really struggle to find it. I think that’s really common at that level of fame. Being Elvis’s daughter is different to being other people’s daughters, I think. Not to say she didn’t have a few great friendships and relationships in her life – it just was always a struggle.’
Lisa Marie was born into unfathomable fame not of her own making – and by the time she was old enough to be an active participant in her own tabloid-bait dramas (Jacko! The 108-day ‘hurricane marriage’ to Nicolas Cage!), it coincided with a brutal time for women in the public eye: the 1990s. ‘There weren’t as many famous people, so if you were one of the 20, you’re getting all of it,’ says Keough. ‘Now there are so many famous people – there are thousands of people I’ve never heard of!’
How has fame felt to Keough? She’s pretty used to it, she says. Besides, it’s easier being Elvis’s granddaughter than his daughter, she thinks. Safety is her red line, and as for the rest of it? ‘I don’t know, I think I just try to be authentically myself all the time.’
Being authentically herself for Keough meant pursuing a career as a performer, despite her parents (her dad is the singer Danny Keough) trying – and failing – to talk her out of it. ‘I felt like I was getting into something that could go terribly wrong. [My mum] would say to me: “If you’re going to do this, you have to be so good at what you do, or else nobody’s going to take you seriously, you’re not going to get any jobs and it’s going to be embarrassing,”’ she says. ‘You don’t want to be an embarrassing celebrity kid! She ingrained that into me and my brother so deeply.’
Because she had a different surname and was a generation removed, Keough tried not to make her family her pass. Nevertheless, she says, unprompted: ‘I’m sure being Elvis’s grand- daughter has made it easier for me to get an agent, to have meetings and all this stuff, when I started out. I know there’s so much nepo-baby stuff at the moment [and] I certainly acknowledge that aspect of the privilege of coming where I come from. I’m not an idiot! I’m aware of privilege in an acute way.’
It might have opened doors, sure, but Keough has built a solid acting career on her talents. She’s made interesting indie choices (Sasquatch Sunset, American Honey, Under the Silver Lake), done the blockbuster thing (Mad Max: Fury Road) and led prestige TV projects (alongside Lily Gladstone, for instance, in Under the Bridge). Still, did it take an extra level of self-assurance to go near singing for her turn in Amazon’s Daisy Jones & the Six adaptation?
She laughs. Because she was acting as a singer, it just felt fun. ‘I did not think I could sing at all, so the fact that I could get by was kind of, like, cool!’ she says. ‘I also have a real chip missing, which I think can be a benefit to me: I don’t get embarrassed [with] performing, with creating art, with writing, because you’re always changing. I feel very fluid with that part of myself. You’re always going to do a shitty job at something; that doesn’t dictate your entire existence.’ Keough has the steadied maturity of someone who has seen a lot. As well as her mother’s death, From Here to the Great Unknown looks at the agony of losing her brother Benjamin to suicide; the feeling of having your world flipped over in an instant. Keough is a certified death doula, and notes an ‘extreme discomfort’ in society around death. ‘I wish we could reframe it. Because I think the fear of death dictates people’s lives in a way that maybe they aren’t even aware of.’
To experience grief is to experience love, and Keough is at peace with the acceptance that it is always changing. ‘I try to just stay open to whatever it is. I’ve had that experience in grief where I’m like, “OK, now I’m feeling this way” – and then it changes. I don’t have anything figured out. I’m just going about my life as best I can, and trying to be humble and fluid within that. Things just change so much that I try to just ride the waves and surrender and find joy. Something I’ve experienced with discomfort is [that] the joy I feel about little things is really beautiful.’
As a non-addict ‘in a family full of addicts’, surrender is some- thing she has come to terms with. ‘You can’t do anything. You can’t. And I think I spent so much of my life going, “OK, now I’m going to try this, now I’m going to try this”, and nothing worked,’ she says, of trying to help others get sober.
One thing that both the addict and the observer know is that shared experiences help. In that sense, the book serves as a powerful act of service – and a beautiful, meaningful tribute to her mother, who found solace in supporting other grieving parents. ‘I want what my mom wanted with this book: human connection, empathy,’ says Keough. ‘I think storytelling and sharing your story is incredibly powerful. In times where I’ve had hard moments, what helped me most is understanding that it’s a shared experience on this planet. And that most people are experiencing much more than you realise, every day. I think that brings strength to the self.’
When Keough looks back on her upbringing, and the mythology surrounding her family (the enormity of which, she says, she didn’t realise until recently, ‘because people keep reinforcing it to me and going, “Do you know how crazy this is? Your life is so crazy!”’), the thing that strikes her most is ‘how wonderfully colourful my upbringing was. It wasn’t about the fame or anything. I know that’s unusual, but it was more so that there was a lot of joy. Things were very big and fun, all the time. So I kinda look back and – wow! – I can’t believe all that happened. We travelled to so many places and did so many things. And now my life is quite simple. I can’t believe that was real, because we did so much.’
The day is grinding into action and Tupelo will be up soon, her mother there to look after her, a new city to explore, Paris to prepare for. Before we go, I tell her there is hope in the book – it is a reminder to keep going, to accept the dark with the light. What is she hopeful about, I ask. ‘I think for me hope is a choice,’
she says cautiously. ‘And I am much more inspired by the idea of being hopeful, and I would rather live in that headspace. There’s so much evidence of beauty and magic in this world, too; it’s certainly hard, there’s a lot of suffering in this world – you turn on the television and you can watch it, or you can be living it. But I think that life is about both things. Hope is part of it and surrender is part of it and suffering is part of it. I think it’s accepting the complexity of life and why we’re here. We’re here to experience something complicated, not just one thing.’
‘From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir’ by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough is out now.
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