Riley Keough for Vanity Fair

• Keough doesn’t like to discuss her illness because she thinks people will think she’s a whining rich girl. However, Daisy Jones costar, Sam Claflin, saw Keough struggle with pain during production:

“Once she told me, there were moments where I’d catch it. I’d noticed that she’d disengage in fleeting moments between scenes. The fact that she has all that underlying her day-to-day routine and is battling that on top of everything else—it’s nothing short of miraculous.”

• Keough is both withdrawn and careful with her words and very friendly, depending on the topic.

• The Presley/Keough family used to sleep at Graceland: “The tours would start in the morning, and we would hide upstairs until they were over. 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.”

• She is a workaholic and didn’t get that trait from her parents. She said she came out of the womb like that: “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.”

• Reese Witherspoon, an executive producer on Daisy Jones, on Keough: “Despite all the money and the trappings that seem to facilitate an easier life, that is a very, very challenging life. To be under constant scrutiny and still rise to the top and still perform at the highest level…. I’m really in awe of her in how much she challenged herself. Because she didn’t have to.”

• Her childhood was not normal with her family splitting their time between California, Florida, and Hawaii. Her mother divorced her father to marry Michael Jackson. “My whole childhood was probably very extreme. 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.”

• Riley was very young when Michael Jackson was in the picture, so her memories are idyllic. She recalls him shutting down a toy store just because she wanted a teddy bear: “You just remember the love, and I had real love for Michael. 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.”

• On Graceland vs Neverland (Michael Jackson’s home): “I spent more time at Neverland than Graceland, to be honest. That was a real home, whereas Graceland was a museum in my lifetime.”

• She doesn’t keep in touch with her second stepfather Nicolas Cage, but she’d love to do a movie with him.

• Friend and co-director Gina Gammell on Riley’s relationship with her dad Danny Keough: “He’s someone who had no money, and she had this incredibly regular life with him—and then eras with her mom that were extraordinary. That’s why she’s so comfortable in any place.”

• Her mom and dad clashed over Riley’s upbringing. Keough wanted to stay put so Riley could get an education, Lisa Marie liked to travel: “I was always at a loss. My father really cared about my education. My mom was like, ‘You’re an artist. Go be an artist.’”

Keough didn’t graduate from high school, though she still wants to someday. She turned to books, as well as museums, films, and anything else she could use to educate herself. “I like math,” she says, “and my grammar isn’t as bad as you’d think given the circumstances.”

• 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.

• Keough is described as delicate, but not weak. Stewart describes her as painfully shy.

• Keough and Kravitz have been friends since toddler age because Lisa Marie and Lisa Bonet were friends.

• Johnson met Keough in an In-N-Out parking lot when they were 16. “It was like finding a soulmate,” Johnson says. “When I met her, I felt this thing that is so impossible to articulate, growing up in a famous family, there was this solidarity. Understanding. We would just smoke cigarettes with our moms. And they’d call each other and be like, ‘I guess she’s going to stay with you for the next four days. Call me if she needs a ride.’ I’d go to Riley’s and then leave a week later. I don’t know if that’s normal, but, yeah, just running around LA.”

• Riley was a bit wild and drank in her teens but she no longer drinks that much and calls herself somewhat of a granny.

• Riley is humble about her singing voice, debuted in Daisy Jones and the Six, but Dakota calls bullshit: “When we were 19, we started a joke band called Folky Porn. Riley and I both had blond hair. We were hiding out in New York after breakups. We would do three-part harmonies with my brother, Alexander, on Hank Williams songs and John Prine songs, and we’d film them on Photo Booth. Thousands and thousands of takes.”

This is relayed to Riley, and she’s thrilled to be reminded of her teenage pipe dream. “Oh my goodness, Dakota did discover me. I’ve been lying to the world! I was in a band!”

• Steven Soderbergh on Riley: “The most surprising thing about Riley is her complete fearlessness in performing. She protects nothing. Whatever her process is—and she must have a process, you don’t just roll up with stuff this great—she wouldn’t dream of burdening anyone with it. I mean, I can’t find anything wrong with her.”

• Keough met Australian stuntman and actor Ben Smith-Petersen in 2013 while making Mad Max: Fury Road. They married in 2015. “I remember it so vividly, I just knew that we were going to have kids,” Keough says. “It was, in hindsight, very strange. I didn’t know how we’d get there, but we did.”

• The world first discovered that Keough and her husband had welcomed a daughter at Lisa Marie’s funeral at Graceland in January. Keough wrote a eulogy but was too overcome to deliver it, so her husband read it for her. It included these lines: “I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters. Thank you for giving me strength, my heart, my empathy, my courage, my sense of humor, my manners, my temper, my wildness, my tenacity. I’m a product of your heart.”

• Daughter Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen arrived via surrogate in August 2022. Keough says of surrogacy, “I think it’s a very cool, selfless, and incredible act that these women do to help other people. I can carry children, but it felt like the best choice for what I had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff.”

• Her daughter’s middle name is a tribute to her late brother, Benjamin Storm Keough, who died when he was 27.

• Tupelo resembles Riley’s husband but resembles Riley in her eyes and smile.

• Riley on parenthood: “This is the thing in my life so far that I have really wanted to, quote-unquote, get right. I don’t think you ever can be a perfect parent, but I would like to be the best mom for her that I can be. That’s…very important to me.”

• Riley on grandmother Priscilla Presley taking her to court for Lisa Marie’s estate: “When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives. Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us. Everyone was in a bit of a panic to understand how we move forward, and it just took a minute to understand the details of the situation, because it’s complicated. We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family. So I think that there was clarity that needed to be had. Clarity has been had.”

• Riley on grandma Priscilla: “Things with Grandma will be happy. They’ve never not been happy. I’m trying to think of a way to answer it that’s not a 20-minute conversation.”

Another long pause. “There was a bit of upheaval, but now everything’s going to be how it was. She’s a beautiful woman, and she was a huge part of creating my grandfather’s legacy and Graceland. It’s very important to her. He was the love of her life. Anything that would suggest otherwise in the press makes me sad because, at the end of the day, all she wants is to love and protect Graceland and the Presley family and the legacy. That’s her whole life. So it’s a big responsibility she has tried to take on. None of that stuff has really ever been a part of our relationship prior. She’s just been my grandma.”

• There is no drama about Priscilla being buried at Graceland: “I don’t know why she wouldn’t be buried at Graceland. I don’t understand what the drama in the news was about. Yeah. If she wants to be, of course. Sharing Graceland with the world was her idea from the start.” She pauses and swallows. “I always had positive and beautiful memories and association with Graceland. Now, a lot of my family’s buried there, so it’s a place of great sadness at this point in my life.”

• On her brother, Benjamin: “He, in a lot of ways, felt like my twin. We were very connected and very similar. He was much quicker and wittier and a little smarter than me. He was a very special soul.”

After Benjamin’s death, Riley moved in with her mother for six months. “After that, I would still sleep at her house like two or three times a week. She wanted us there. If it was up to her, I would have lived there full-time.”

• On the last time she saw her mother Lisa Marie before her death in January: “We had dinner. That was the last time I saw her. I remember thinking about how beautiful she looked, and that was my strongest memory of the dinner.”

• What Riley wants people to remember about her mother: “I think it would take hours and hours to summarize her. She was just so unapologetically herself in every circumstance, and so strong.”

Here, the sentences start coming in pieces again. “The life she had was not easy, and the treachery she endured and the lack of real love and real friends.… She definitely had some great friends and relationships in her life, but I don’t think she really ever had.… People were just coming for her since she was born—wanting something from her and not being totally authentic. She had to develop very thick skin. She was a very powerful presence and extremely loving and extremely loyal and sort of a lioness—a fierce woman, and a really wonderful mother. I think that would be my summary because I’m her daughter. She was the best mom.”

• Her brother’s death prepared her for her mother’s: “When I lost my brother, there was no road map whatsoever, and it was a lot of big emotions that I didn’t know what to do with. When I lost my mom, I was familiar with the process a little bit more, and I found working to be really helpful. I find it triggering when people say happiness is a choice, but in that moment, I did feel like there was a choice in front of me to give up and let this event take me out or have the courage to work through it. I started trying to move through it and not let it take me out.”

• There’s a line at the end of Daisy Jones, “The chosen ones never know they are chosen” and the interviewer asked Keough what she thought of it, and she joked about how she knew some chosen ones who definitely think they deserved to be chosen. Then she stopped deflecting.

“I think I’ve certainly been chosen for some wonderful things and chosen for some horrible things too. I am aware that I have been through a lot of very crazy things, but I don’t feel like a victim. I don’t feel like poor Riley. I also don’t really feel chosen.”