My opening conversation with Talulah Riley
concerns custody over three goats. “It’s quite a sad
story,” says the actress, warning that there’s no fairy-
tale ending. “I got three goats as a Christmas present
from my boyfriend [at the time] and I loved them
very much.” The boyfriend was Matthew Rice, an
artist 23 years her senior and the former husband
of the pottery doyenne Emma Bridgewater.
Riley’s better-known ex, Elon Musk
(right), has never gifted her goats.
Riley’s relationship with Rice fell
apart — “at which point I took the
goats with me in a fit of pique”. But
when she got Holiday, Eilish and
Piper (named after Billies, despite
being nanny goats) back to her own
home in Hertfordshire she realised
they didn’t have adequate lodgings, so
Rice kindly ferried the trio back to his
farm. “I only have a cocker spaniel and
three ducks because the house is not
ready to receive animals yet,” she says,
settling into a booth at the Chiltern Fire-
house, all peaches and cream beauty in a
Kermit-coloured trouser suit. “My dream
is horses, goats, bees, chickens, ducks,
sheep. No pigs.” There’s too much guilt
eating sausages if you keep pigs.
It’s immediately clear that Riley,
who first found fame with the 2007St Trinian’s naughty schoolgirls film reboot (a sequel
came two years later), is unlike any actress I’ve ever
interviewed. Perhaps unsurprisingly the woman
who married Musk not once but twice — “I think
we got back together at the divorce filing” — is a
teetotal physics geek with a love of carriage driving
(that horsey activity Prince Philip enjoyed)
and campanology (bellringing), for whom
acting seems to be a fun side hustle.
Although if “a call from Steven Spielberg
with some really fascinating job” came
tomorrow she is likely to take it.
The day we meet her ex-husband,
the richest man in the world, is in the
process of buying Twitter for $44
billion. Riley, 36, is still close to
Musk, 50 — “I love Elon fiercely and
always will, not necessarily in an
intense, romantic way but in a broad
‘he’s my family’ way” — and loyally
maintains that he should do “whatever
he sees fit” with the social media jugger-
naut. I voice my shock that she doesn’t have
an authenticating blue tick on her Twitter
account. “I think I do. I think you found the
wrong [Talulah Riley],” she says. I show
Riley her own Twitter page — more than
53,000 followers but no tick — on my
phone. “I’ve been un-blue-ticked!” she
squeals. “Is that for bad behaviour or for‘I believe in
marriage.
I love
marriage’
She likes bellringing, studies maths in her spare time – oh, and she
married Elon Musk not once but twice. Now she’s about to play
Vivienne Westwood in Danny Boyle’s TV series about the Sex Pistols.
Laura Pullman meets the gloriously eccentric Talulah Riley
Photographs Claire Rothstein Styling Phoebe SchuringsThe Sunday Times Style • 11