Riley Keough and the cinema she made far from Graceland

Riley Keough

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 29, 1989 Santa Monica, California, United States
Occupation	Actress, Director, Producer
Known for	Mad Max: Fury Road, The Devil All the Time, The House That Jack Built
Awards	Caméra d'Or, Cannes Film Festival, 2022 (War Pony, co-director)

The film that announced Riley Keough as a director, War Pony, has almost nothing to do with Elvis Presley. Co-directed with filmmaker Gina Gammell, it follows two young Lakota men navigating life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota — a world as far from Graceland’s mythology as American geography allows. That distance was not incidental. For someone who spent her early career fielding questions about her grandfather, directing a film whose entire reason for being was someone else’s story was the most precise statement she could make.

She was born in Santa Monica, the eldest daughter of singer-songwriter Lisa Marie Presley and musician Danny Keough — and, through her mother, the eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Her parents divorced when she was still young; her mother went on to a brief marriage to Michael Jackson. Riley grew up moving between her father’s homes in Hawaii and Los Angeles, eventually homeschooled due to the logistics of split custody and frequent travel. Graceland was part of her geography, a family home that happened to be a national monument, and she navigated the fact of it the way children navigate anything impossible: by carrying it and looking for the door out.

The door, for a while, was modeling. From her mid-teens she worked the runway for Dolce & Gabbana and became the face of Christian Dior’s perfume campaigns — work that was lucrative, visible, and emphatically not acting. When she made the transition, it was gradual. Her feature debut came in a supporting role in The Runaways (2010), the biopic about Joan Jett’s band, where she played Marie Currie and did nothing that called attention to itself. Magic Mike (2012), the Soderbergh comedy-drama about male strippers in Florida, was bigger and more commercial, and still she stayed in the register of someone who lets the film breathe around her.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) changed the context without changing the approach. George Miller’s action epic gave her global exposure and introduced her to Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen on set in Namibia and Australia — they married in Napa, California, in February 2015. But the film that first made critics stop and pay specific attention was American Honey (2016), Andrea Arnold’s loose, radical road movie about magazine-selling teenagers crossing the American Midwest. Keough plays Krystal, the ruthless sales manager of the van — a predator in flip-flops, commanding a bus full of runaways. Arnold shot the film in sequence with mostly non-professional actors, and Keough held her register against all of it. The Independent Spirit Award nomination that followed was the first external signal that something other than the Presley inheritance was being evaluated.

Riley Keough in Hold the Dark (2018) — Riley Keough in Hold the Dark

The Girlfriend Experience, the Starz limited series produced by Steven Soderbergh and adapted from his 2009 film, gave her an entirely different kind of attention. As Christine Reade, a law student who works as a high-end escort, she was in nearly every scene of the thirteen-episode season, and the Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a limited series confirmed that the attention was not going away. What she did with it was, characteristically, unpredictable.

The years between 2017 and 2021 read, in retrospect, as a deliberate exercise in difficult choices. It Comes at Night (2017), Trey Edward Shults’s horror film set in a post-plague house of dread. Hold the Dark (2018), Jeremy Saulnier’s cold, violent film set in Alaska. The Lodge (2019), from Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, in which she plays a woman whose past is being weaponized against her by her stepchildren. Zola (2021), Janicza Bravo’s A24 adaptation of the real-life Twitter thread about a road trip to Florida that turns dangerous. These were not films designed to build an audience for the next film. They were, one after another, attempts to see what a screen could hold.

The question that follows a filmography like this is inevitable: was the art-house positioning itself a kind of calculation — trading one currency (Presley, model, tabloid-adjacent) for another (credibility, directors’ choice, festival perennial)? There is no clean answer. What is verifiable is that the trajectory reached its clearest expression in War Pony, which she co-directed after meeting screenwriters Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy on the Pine Ridge Reservation and spending years developing their script with Gina Gammell. The Caméra d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the prize for best first feature, went to a film about Lakota men that Keough had no autobiographical claim on — and it was awarded on her birthday, May 29. Whatever else that is, it is not brand management.

In January 2023, her mother Lisa Marie Presley died from cardiac arrest, a complication of bariatric surgery. Riley became the sole inheritor of the Graceland estate. The convergence of personal loss and inherited public monument landed while she was completing work on Daisy Jones & the Six, Amazon Prime Video‘s adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, in which she plays Daisy Jones — a fictional rock singer in 1970s Los Angeles whose voice and ambition are both enormous. The role generated nominations at both the Golden Globes and the Primetime Emmy Awards.

At the end of 2025, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly arrived on Netflix, an ensemble film she shared with George Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Laura Dern. Then came Cannes 2026, where Butterfly Jam — directed by Kantemir Balagov and set in a Circassian immigrant community in New Jersey — opened the Directors’ Fortnight section with her in the cast alongside Barry Keoghan.

She and Ben Smith-Petersen have two children: a daughter born via surrogate in August 2022, and a second child born in 2025. She co-founded the production company Felix Culpa.

The slate ahead — Out of This World with Albert Serra, Rosebush Pruning with Callum Turner and Elle Fanning, the cult drama series Cult Following with Dakota Johnson — points toward someone with no apparent interest in consolidation. Fifteen years after a modeling career that came with every expectation except the one she had, Riley Keough is making the films she intends to make, which is the only inheritance worth tracking.