This story about Riley Keough and “Daisy Jones & the Six” first appeared in the Limited series/movies issue from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
She stepped out into the blue stage lights as if she’d been there before, a chiffon cloak billowing in the wind as she warily eyed the guitarist a few feet away. Her wariness gradually melted away, replaced by a range of emotions: joy, then a passion that she felt fueled by, and a joy that seemed almost desperate. She was flirtatious and seductive when sharing a microphone, but when her partner left the stage, she seized a love song and turned it into an instrument of salvation.
This all happened during the concert scenes in the final episode of “Daisy Jones & the Six,” and it resulted in one thing: In the title role, Riley Keough was practically a rock star. In a way, that was strange, since the actress-writer-director-producer had never played guitar or sung in public before landing the lead role in the Prime Video limited series. But otherwise, how could you doubt that she’s got some rock ‘n’ roll in her? Keough, after all, is the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, the guy who basically invented the rock star job.
When I mentioned that, she laughed. “Yes, yes, I know,” she said. “It’s funny, and a lot of the feedback I get when I share that I’ve never sung or played instruments is that people are so confused about it.” Another laugh. “But it’s the truth. For whatever reason, I never picked up a guitar and sang until the show.”
But when that final concert was filmed in New Orleans in the spring of 2021, she was ready to accept the role and claim a bit of the legacy. “We had been rehearsing to do the live performances and then we had like five months of just performing,” she said with a laugh. “We thought, ‘We want to act now!’ When I see the acting stuff, it makes me feel joy because we all felt wild. The acting was very real and we didn’t have to fake the fun. We were having the best time ever, and there was a real sense of freedom, even though it was probably four or five in the morning.”
Not even a slice of fictional rock stardom was on Keough’s wish list growing up in tumultuous circumstances: Her parents divorced when she was 5, and her mother subsequently briefly married Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. She became interested in film and specifically directing at a young age, but she also developed a dislike for the kind of thing that would put her in the public eye. She made the conscious decision not to work during her teens, other than a bit of modeling, because she, she said, “I’m a bit of a workaholic.”
When she started acting at the age of 20, she gravitated towards dark indie films and worked with directors such as Andrea Arnold, Lars von Trier, Nick Cassavetes, Trey Edward Shults, Jeremy Saulnier, Antonio Campos and Steven Soderbergh, who cast her in two movies and that she executive produced the television series “The Girlfriend Experience,” in which she played a law student who works as an upper-class escort. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, she had two movies. One was “American Honey,” Arnold’s deliberately lawless and sloppy road trip through the American countryside with a group of rowdy young men who used magazine sales as an excuse to rip off, smoke, and party. The other was Danish provocateur von Trier’s “The House That Jack Built,” a nasty film about a sadistic serial killer that’s punctuated by lengthy monologues about Hitler. In that one of hers, the killer played by Matt Dillon cut off her breasts, on camera, not off of her, before killing her.
“I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m never going to do anything conventional,’” he said. “What I was drawn to turned out to be a large number of independent films. For me, it’s very character-focused and first and foremost the director.”
But was there also a feeling of not wanting to do something conventional that might put her in the spotlight?
“Probably,” she said. “It wasn’t super conscious, but there’s a part of me that values having a normal life. You know, I grew up in a very No private life. My entire childhood was very public. My family in the 90s was very much in the public eye, and things were really difficult in the sense of not being able to live normally. Lots of paparazzi and security. I appreciated the idea that I could potentially have the opportunity to go to the supermarket and do normal things, and I realized that I could have that. I wasn’t born to fame like my mother, you know?
But when “Daisy Jones” came out, I was ready to do something that was both more conventional and funnier, partly because it had spent a decade in an independent phase, but also because it had been through a particularly dark phase. period, with health problems and the death of her younger brother in 2020.
“I have Lyme disease, and the sickest I’ve ever been was probably the year we filmed ‘Daisy Jones,’” she said. “And I had also lost my brother, so emotionally and physically I was totally overwhelmed. [The disease] makes basic things like getting out of bed and going for a walk a challenge.”