Soulful
With
Riley Keough
2022 was a watershed year for RILEY KEOUGH, when she scooped the coveted Camera d’Or prize for her directorial debut at the Cannes Film Festival, an occasion made even more meaningful as it coincided with the premiere of Elvis – the award-winning biopic about her grandfather. This year, Keough is reaching even greater heights playing the lead in rock’n’roll drama Daisy Jones & the Six. She talks to MARTHA HAYES about finding her voice, the grittier side of fame, and uncovering love in darkness
It is a truth universally acknowledged (in Hollywood, anyway) that an actor in want of a part is sometimes required to lie. “We will say we can do many things that are not on our résumé,” nods Riley Keough over Sunday breakfast at a Los Angeles hotel. “When they [the casting directors of Amazon Prime’s Daisy Jones & the Six] asked, ‘Can she sing?’, I was like, ‘Just tell them yes, and I’ll figure it out before Monday!’”
Prior to auditioning for the title role in the hotly anticipated TV adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling novel, which chronicles the escapades of a fictional rock band in the 1970s, the most singing Keough, 33, had done was humming around the house. However, to play Daisy Jones, the band’s formidable flame-haired frontwoman, she would have to do more than just sing; she’d have to learn how to belt.
“I called my agent and I was like, ‘I don’t know how to get my voice to do that,’” she recalls, moving the dictaphone closer to her to offset how softly spoken she is. “They said, ‘Try singing a Lady Gaga song and see what happens’ – and I was like, ‘Sing Lady Gaga? Are you out of your mind?!’ I sat in my car and cried because I was like, ‘I can’t do it’. I hated not being able to do it.”
“I was GIFTED – and cursed – in this life with a severe amount of EMPATHY. I have a hard time – even when people are being awful – not finding LOVE”
Several sessions with a singing coach later, Keough – after an already grueling round of auditions – quite literally found her voice and won the role; a role she had been infatuated with before she’d even read the book. “I have very severe fomo for the 1970s,” she says. In a culture that has become obsessed with ‘nepo babies’, the moral of this story is a gratifying one. No one can simply hustle a singing gig. Not even the granddaughter of the ‘King of Rock’n’Roll’.
Much has been made of Keough’s famous family connections, but her spellbinding, multi-dimensional performance in Daisy Jones & the Six is entirely her own. The actor, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her breakthrough playing an escort in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2016), and earned further acclaim in Andrea Arnold drama American Honey (2016), is the real deal. Not only can she act – and, as it turns out, belt – she produces, writes and directs, too (more on this later).
“I really IDENTIFIED with the way [Daisy] wasn’t being taken SERIOUSLY in her art. I think a lot of women at the time probably weren’t – and STILL aren’t”
With Keough center stage in Daisy Jones & the Six, the 10-part series, produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, is an exhilarating insight into life in a band at the height of its fame. It’s a wild ride that’s more than just sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – it’s love triangles, addiction struggles and catchy original songs written by super-producer Blake Mills and the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Marcus Mumford. The transition of Daisy’s wardrobe to mirror her ascent is equally captivating, as braids, pastels and floaty dresses become leather, fur coats and heavy eye makeup. Keough’s own uniform is more “go-to comfort” – jeans and a T-shirt today – although her black Gucci slides and cat-eye sunglasses add a definite je ne sais quoi.
With the show originally slated for a 2020 release, Keough and her castmates – who include Sam Claflin (Billy Dunne), Camila Morrone (Billy’s wife, Camila) and Suki Waterhouse (keyboardist Karen Sirko) – first met at the end of 2019, with the intention of rehearsing for a couple of months at Sound City Studios in LA before filming began. But then the pandemic broke out…
“We ended up having a year to rehearse and learn our instruments, and we became a pretty legit band [over Zoom],” recalls Keough. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we’re playing live and we know what we’re doing’. We didn’t have to fake the confidence in ourselves – it was authentic. In hindsight, a month or two of rehearsal would have done nothing for us. It would have been a lot of pretending.”
While the tempestuous relationship between Daisy and Billy in the book was famously inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, Keough – who quietly welcomed her first child with her husband, Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen, six months ago – looked to a wide range of references, from Bruce Springsteen to Cher, when preparing for the role.
“I wanted the moments in which you SEE Daisy’s addiction to NOT feel glamorous. To make sure that those moments had WEIGHT to them”
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to exclusively look at women; I want to look at Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Hendrix’. I pulled influence from men because I felt like Daisy was ahead of her time, in terms of how open and how willing she was to go into a space and be confident. I think that was really hard for women to do,” she explains.
“I watched so many videos of [singers] in that era to get a sense of their movements. There wasn’t the freedom there is now for women, and that is evident in how they behaved on stage. It was much more restricted in the 1970s, so I struggled with that because my body movements are so inherently of my generation.”
She was also determined to depict her character’s substance abuse in a way that felt thoughtful and appropriate. “Because this is something I’ve experienced in my family,” she says, carefully, “I wanted the moments in which you see Daisy’s addiction to not feel glamorous; to make sure that those moments had weight to them; that we’re seeing the humanity behind the closed doors of what people are perceiving to be glamour.”
Crucial to her portrayal was the sense of “journey” – from wannabe singer to bona fide rock star. “I wanted to make Daisy very human and have moments of being silly. I wanted to see other sides to her before she ends up this quintessential fucked-up rock star on drugs,” explains Keough, who was particularly inspired by “the essence of childlike excitement” she uncovered in a letter that Janis Joplin wrote to her family when she was touring at the height of her career.
“Being excitable and seeing the wonder in the world, but really struggling with how she wants the world to be, versus what she’s being handed, is something I can really identify with,” she muses. “I also really identified with the way she wasn’t being taken seriously in her art. I think a lot of women at the time probably weren’t – and still aren’t.”
“I was watching a video on Instagram the other day, of women on late-night talk shows from 2008 or something, and the questions they were asked were so appalling and disgusting,” she continues. “It was shocking. For women, [the public eye] was a vicious place for many years – and it still is.”
Growing up in LA, Keough’s upbringing was very creative (her father, Danny Keough, played bass guitar in her mother Lisa Marie Presley’s band before they divorced when she was five). A precocious child, who was constantly putting on plays and making her own films, she was determined to make her own way. After a stint modeling as a teenager, she decided to embark on an acting career.
Keough was 20 when she made her film debut in The Runaways (about the 1970s all-girl rock group), playing Dakota Fanning’s sister, and she has worked consistently ever since. Her presence, whether she’s in a big-budget blockbuster movie such as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or a polarizing indie film like Zola (2020), is beguiling. Keough’s schtick is finding the humanity in complicated, morally questionable characters; making the unlikeable, well, likeable.
“I was gifted – and cursed – in this life with a severe amount of empathy for people,” she says. “I’m really sensitive and I have a hard time – even when people are being awful – not finding love. I can sense that, underneath it all, there’s love. I truly believe that.”
“It’s so crazy to have your FIRST film get into CANNES. And to have Elvis there the same year was so MEANINGFUL”
Keough is also a producer, having set up the company Felix Culpa with her best friend Gina Gammell in 2018, and she made her directorial debut at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival – the same year Baz Luhrmann premiered his high-octane, multi-award-winning movie about her grandfather. “I just couldn’t believe it,” recalls Keough, whose gritty drama War Pony was awarded the Camera d’Or for best debut. “It’s so crazy to have your first film get into Cannes. And to have Elvis there the same year was so meaningful.”
In January, amidst Elvis’s award-season success, Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley, tragically passed away. The sudden loss came just a few years after the death of Keough’s younger brother, Benjamin. Shortly after the news was announced, she posted a tribute to her mother on Instagram, sharing a black-and-white childhood photo and a recent picture of them together, captioned, “I feel blessed to have a photo of the last time I saw my beautiful mama.”
Channeling so much energy into work when she is on a project, Keough has learned to prioritize recharging when she is at home – which is still her native LA, with her husband and daughter. “It’s really important for me to be connected, somehow, spiritually,” she says. “I spend a lot of time doing things that are grounding. My body is really important to me because I have Lyme disease, so I’m trying to take care of myself.”
For Keough, being recognized at Cannes was about so much more than seeing her name on a trophy; it was about finally being validated. In the past, she admits that she’s “found it easier to sort of disengage and play dumb. I think it’s years of being a female, going, ‘Please listen, I know what I’m talking about’ – and then it not amounting to anything… So, it was a moment, as a woman, where you go, ‘Fuck you’. I am not here by accident. I put a lot of work in to be here.” With her ever-expanding résumé and the credentials to match, there isn’t any doubt about it.
Daisy Jones & the Six is on Amazon Prime Video now
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