From the age of 10, or whenever she could get her hands on a camera – whatever came first – Riley KeOugh was making movies.
Not starring in them, making them. “I wanted to direct and write and do films, from as early on as I can remember,” the 33-year-old says. Keough was a tiny auteur, working across genres in pursuit of her art. She made “a lot of scary movies”, she recalls. “I did family 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.”
Keough smiles serenely at her phone camera. She's lying in bed in the cosiest of grey jumpers, her hair a Daisy Jones tumble of copper over one shoulder. It's been a long day, she admits: she's in production on Under The Bridge, a true-crime miniseries in which she plays a novelist investigating the gruesome death of a teenage girl. Keough has been working six or seven days a week to finish it. “I don't have chill time, I'm working this weekend,” she admits, a little sheepishly. She describes herself as a “workaholic” – “I really work to the bone. I'm not very good at taking time off” – but Keough's schedule right now is a particular variety of busy. “I have press, I have this show I'm doing, I have life stuff I'm dealing with,” Keough explains. “So every day is very booked up.”
The work stuff: She is the star of. She directed her debut film , which was awarded the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the same prize that launched the filmmaking careers of Steve McQueen and Miranda July. And the life stuff: Keough is a new mother – “I have a half-Australian baby,” she beams – with husband of eight years Ben Smith-Petersen, the boy from Byron Bay she met while making 2015's . And it is also still barely a few months since the tragic death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, in January.
