Riley Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter. Her mom was Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child, and Riley has made a name of her own as an actress.
But when Riley talks about love, her story does not start in Memphis or Hollywood. It starts on a movie set in Namibia, in southern Africa.
She was there filming “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the big action movie, when she met an Australian stuntman named Ben Smith-Petersen. “We shot Mad Max: Fury Road in Namibia, which is where I met Ben. He was on the stunt crew,” she told Vogue.
A year later, they crossed paths again during reshoots in Sydney. Vogue says Riley came to Australia for a month in December 2013 “and left with her soulmate.” Riley put it her own way: “I really did fall in love with my husband and also Australia in the same couple of weeks.”
She is still grateful for that movie. She later told SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show” that “of course, I met my husband, so it was like extra life-changing.”
On Feb. 4, 2015, Riley and Ben got married at Calistoga Ranch in California’s Napa Valley. Lisa Marie was there as mother of the bride, and one of Riley’s little twin sisters was a flower girl.
That is the wedding most fans know about.
But Riley says it was not really their first.
“Technically, our first wedding was in Nepal, because we were there building a school a couple of weeks before we got married,” she told Vogue.
So a couple of weeks before the big day in California, the two of them were halfway around the world, helping put up a school. The local families they met there found out the couple was about to tie the knot, and they wanted to be part of it.
“The families knew we were getting married and they said, ‘Let us throw you a Hindu wedding.'”
Photos from that day show Riley in a deep red dress with a flower necklace and Ben wearing a yellow garland. It was a gift from the local families, and Riley clearly never forgot it.
And that is the one that got to her. “That wedding, I cried,” Riley said.
The California wedding was the grand one, with her family there. Yet Riley admits her nerves got the better of her that day. “At my bigger wedding I was a little nervous, I wasn’t as present.”
Plenty of brides say their wedding went by in a blur. Riley just happens to have a second one to compare it with.
The big California day had the ranch and her mom by her side. But the wedding that brought the tears was the one those families threw for two visitors who had come to help build a school.
Riley and Ben have built a family together since then, and their daughter, Tupelo Storm, was born in 2022.
