Riley Keough
Riley Keough is an actor, born 1989.
Riley Keough was born in Santa Monica in 1989, the eldest daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and the eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. She modelled from 2004 to 2008 and made her film debut playing Marie Currie in The Runaways (2010). Steven Soderbergh gave her a small part in Magic Mike, and Mad Max: Fury Road put her in her first blockbuster. She then spent the rest of the decade going the other way, into low-budget American films that nobody would mistake for a career strategy.
Her subject, over and over, is performance. The escort in the first season of The Girlfriend Experience, which brought a Golden Globe nomination, is a woman constructing a version of herself for money and finding she prefers it. Stefani in Zola talks in a voice she has borrowed from other people. Daisy Jones is a singer whose whole life is stagecraft. Keough is very good at showing you the effort inside the act, the half-second where the mask has to be reset.
She is also the rare famous-family actor who took the harder road deliberately. American Honey, which brought an Independent Spirit nomination, is a road movie shot with non-professionals. It Comes at Night and The Lodge are cold, bleak horror films with no glamour in them at all. Hold the Dark and Under the Silver Lake are stranger still.
She directed War Pony in 2023, and since then has moved between prestige television, independent leads and studio work without settling into any of them.
Movies (28)
- Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
- Rosebush Pruning (2026)
- Logan Lucky (2017)
- The House That Jack Built (2018)
- Jay Kelly (2025)
- The Guilty (2021)
- Hold the Dark (2018)
- The Devil All the Time (2020)
- Magic Mike (2012)
- The Lodge (2020)
- Under the Silver Lake (2018)
- The Good Doctor (2011)
- Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025)
- It Comes at Night (2017)
- Manodrome (2023)
- Zola (2021)
- Paterno (2018)
- Earthquake Bird (2019)
- The Discovery (2017)
- American Honey (2016)
- The Runaways (2010)
- Yellow (2012)
- Lovesong (2017)
- Jack & Diane (2012)
- Kiss of the Damned (2012)
- War Pony (2023)
- We Don't Belong Here (2017)
- LA Originals (2020)
TV (7)
Where to start with Riley Keough
The clean entry point is American Honey. She plays the woman running a crew of teenagers selling magazine subscriptions across the Midwest, and she is genuinely frightening in it without ever raising her voice much.
From there, The Girlfriend Experience is the performance that changed how people cast her, and Zola is the funniest and most controlled thing she has done. Take them as a pair and you have her whole method.
If you came for horror, It Comes at Night and The Lodge are the two, both airless, both built on her being watchable while doing almost nothing. Daisy Jones & the Six is the mainstream option and better than it needed to be. And War Pony, which she directed, is worth seeing precisely because it looks nothing like anything else here.