Riley Keough for Vogue Australia

Riley Keough is Vogue Australia’s cover star.

She talks about Australia, Daisy Jones, and partying with Dakota Johnson.

• Riley always knew she wanted to be involved in film and at the age of ten was writing and directing her own horror movies and dramas. “I remember I made a little movie about a single mom who was pregnant and her husband left her. I actually have a video of that. I was probably 10 or 11.”

• She calls herself a workaholic, currently working seven days a week to finish Hulu’s true crime miniseries Under the Bridge: “I don’t have chill time, I’m working this weekend. I really work to the bone. I’m not very good at taking time off…I have press, I have this show I’m doing, I have life stuff I’m dealing with. So every day is very booked up.”

• She is loving being a mother and feels grateful to have the experience.

• Riley’s friend, model Abbey Lee: “She has an enigmatic quality to her. As close as I’ve managed to get to her, there is always this mysterious element to Riley that belongs somewhere, maybe on another planet, or in another time. She can hypnotise you with that element…Sometimes you meet certain people and you just have a feeling that they will mean something in your life. That’s how I just always felt with her.”

• She and Abbey Lee became close due to “awful days” on the set of Mad Max.

• Her teenage years were spent hanging around the parking lots of In-N-Out Burger with her best friend, Dakota Johnson, and sneaking into bars on the Sunset Strip to watch their boyfriends, who were in a band, play gigs. “We were sort of living our version of 1970s in LA, and we kind of dressed like that. We’d wear suede and fur coats and bandanas…and we would hang out at the Whiskey [nightclub].”

• Daisy Jones author Taylor Jenkins Reid: “It still stuns me just how much Riley looks like the book’s original cover. I know Riley has said she feels like she was born to play Daisy Jones, but I sometimes wonder if it’s the other way around. I suspect something was working through me, to create Daisy for her.”

• She is very proud of Daisy Jones and the Six because of how hard everyone worked.

• Her Daisy Jones costar Sam Claflin adores her: “I just love who she is as a person. How joyous and excitable she is. I’ve rarely seen her without a smile, you know? She’s just such a positive force of nature… Some people are innately good and Riley is one of those people.”

Claflin remembers an early joint singing lesson for the series, the first time he had heard Keough’s voice: “We were asking to sing whilst staring into each other’s eyes— which we could barely do without cracking up laughing— and I just remember us both being so similar, in that neither of us had any confidence at all…She had a really beautiful voice, but it was quiet. I had a big voice, which needed taming. She was nervous. I was petrified. We were lucky that we weren’t going through it alone, I think. We always had each other to lean on.”

• Despite being an actress and growing up in a high profile family, she prefers smaller projects and living under the radar.

• She booked her very first role from her first audition at 19 for The Runaways. She then went a year before she was able to book another role.

• Riley doesn’t quite know what to make of herself as a teenager: “I was probably much more shy and introverted. This is more a public perception— I think at home with my close friends would be different. But I think the way that I presented myself in the world would’ve felt more of a listener …” she trails off. “I didn’t feel I had as much agency. That’s also being a young woman, I think I just didn’t—I was less confident.”

As a teenager, she remembers her confidence brimming out of her, “thinking, like, ‘Oh I’m so good and I’m the best,’ before the world breaks you a little bit.” Keough isn’t sure what to make of herself at that age. She tries a couple of times, before settling on the notion that it was a different era. “I think as a woman now, you’re more encouraged to be yourself. When I was a teenager, it was still a little bit like…I want to be successful and to do all these things, but I need to present as this nice sweet girl. I don’t know. I was very conflicted, I think.”

• Riley is at peace with who she is as a person now: “I’m definitely changed [as a person]. I change every year. I feel like a totally different person than I was a year ago. But I think in essence I’ve always been the same. I think that I’ve just gone through more, I’ve experienced more. And I think as you get older, you become more yourself in some ways.

I think I’m open to whatever life brings…It’s taken a lot of work. I think when enough happens in your life you start to realize, ‘Oh, I can either roll with life and just allow life to unfold, or I can resist everything.’ I’ve found, for me, that I find the most peace when I don’t resist anything.”

• Currently, Riley is trying to pick her next project, pouring through “10,000 scripts” for something that excites her. She wants to make the best of her time with what she chooses.

• Riley, her husband Ben Smith-Petersen and their daughter are going to try to make the trip back to Ben’s native Australia since they haven’t been since 2019. Riley considers Australia a second home and would move there if it weren’t so far.

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