Riley Keough for Instyle & Variety; Taylour Paige Pays Tribute
Riley Keough Understands the Assignmenthttps://t.co/r2ZaUTUbsK pic.twitter.com/qZgGb2nnDm
- InStyle (@InStyle) June 29, 2021
- Riley was the only choice for Janicza Bravo, who had seen her in American Honey. Bravo pursued her in a multiple person operation at the Toronto Film Festival in an attempt to get her the script. After meeting the far more quiet and reserved Keough in person, Bravo thought, "if this is what she is in personhood, the thing that she becomes as an actress is possessed."
- Riley didn't graduate high school due to her mom's lifestyle and her own modeling career starting when she was around fourteen. "It's a shame, because I really wanted an education, and I really wanted to go to college, I just didn't have a lifestyle that would permit that."
- On her family's multiple generations of nepotism: "I grew up with my mom saying, 'Anything you do in life, you're going to have to take it seriously, and work really hard at it, and be really good at it. Don't just dip your toes into things...I felt this sense of, oh gosh ... I was a little bit afraid to fail."
- On her "minstrel menace" character, Keough states there was a commitment from her and production to make the character as offensive and menacing as possible to Taylour Paige's star-making straight man turn.
- Taylour believes she and Riley were fated to meet and become best friends.
- Keough has become more spiritual and accepting of pain and death since her brother Benjamin's death. "when you realize [pain is a] part of it, and your expectation isn't to just be feeling joy, that's been a real shift for me in finding those moments and things to smile about."
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Riley Keough Talks Her ‘Demonic’ ‘Zola’ Character: ‘She Was Offensive in Every Way’ https://t.co/vlbGUxN3RQ
- Variety (@Variety) June 29, 2021
Riley speaks with Variety's “Just for Variety” podcast podcast about her new movie Zola.
- Calls her character in Zola "demonic," admits she apologized to the cast and crew during rehearsals for her character's awfulness. Costars Taylour Paige and Coleman Domingo, along with director Janicza Bravo, helped her with nailing some of her culturally inappropriate dialect.
- She will be doing her own singing in “Daisy and the Six,” the upcoming Amazon series adaptation of the novel of the same name.
- She doesn't listen much to grandfather Elvis Presley's music due to the emotion it brought out of her mother Lisa Marie.
- Riley makes a conscious decision to speak about her brother and best friend Benjamin, who died by suicide nearly a year ago. She wants to do as much as she can to raise awareness around mental health and suicide.
- She says of Benjamin and why she chose to show videos of him laughing and happy: "I think people have ideas about suicide and what that looks like. I did. ...In our scenario, I never would have imagined it. It wasn’t something that I saw coming so just taking away that bias around suicide for me was really important, that he was incredible, he was so smart, so funny [and] he was talented at everything he did. I think people have these ways they imagine mental health looking... I just wanted to share that people you’d never know would take their life, can take their life."
And finally, on the eve of the film's release, Taylour Paige paid tribute to her best friend and soulmate.
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Zola is out today!
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