to me at the time that if someone
was going to come in and want to
marry me, they would want to marry
me immediately.”
In 2010 there was a big white
wedding in Scotland’s Dornoch
Cathedral — the bride in Vera Wang,
the Silicon Valley bros in kilts — and
Riley paused her acting career to help
raise Musk’s twins, Griffin and
Xavier, and triplets, Kai, Saxon and
Damian, in California. The couple
divorced in 2012 (Riley explains that
she was deeply homesick for England) but quickly
reunited, wed again in 2013, before divorcing for a
second time in 2016. Aware that the double-wedding,
double-divorce appears “very strange from the
outside”, she argues that it felt weird to be together
unmarried when they had been married previously.
Today, happy in a blossoming new relationship, Riley
looks back on “that journey with Elon” with “incredible
fondness” and recalls routinely taking her young step-
sons to the factories where Musk was busily empire
building. “He had no qualms about letting me be right
there with him while he was doing everything,” she
says, adding that he remains hugely supportive. “Elon
and I both are wildly romantic people in the broadest
sense of the word. Hence he’s building rocket ships to
other planets, etcetera. And I’m more romantic in a
Victorian, communing-with-nature sort of way, but
that meets in terms of heady romance.” Riley is excited
to be flying to America imminently to visit Musk and
his family — he has since had another son called X, and
a daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl, with his Canadian musi-
cian on-off girlfriend, Grimes, 34. (The existence of
Musk’s first daughter was revealed in March after a
journalist interviewed Grimes at home and probed her
on the sound of a crying baby upstairs.)
Pondering romantic age gaps — Musk and Rice are
considerably older than her, Brodie-Sangster is almost
five years younger — Riley believes that not seeing
age as important is “probably an only-child thing”.
It’s in adulthood that she finds having no siblingsdifficult. “This is drastic and morbid,
but I think when [my parents] die,
which they inevitably will, it’s like
being the last native speaker of a
language. In terms of shared jokes,
shared expressions, ways of being.”
Riley’s mother, whom Riley
describes as “my life’s hero”, lost her
sight in her left eye aged 21 – “the
junior doctor slipped through her
retina by accident” — and gradually
lost vision in her right eye until, about
seven years ago, she was registered
blind. “I wish I knew better how to be supportive,” she
says quietly. “I don’t think I could cope with it, you
know, in terms of the reality of it. She does remarkably
well.” The plan is for her parents to move into the
cottage on the grounds of her house.
Riley is cracking company; I’d read beforehand that
she was shy. “I just score massively on introversion [in
personality tests]. Basically off the charts, which
doesn’t directly correlate to shy,” she says. “Introver-
sion cures you of all ills in terms of peer pressure. I’ve
never felt peer pressure.” Aged 12, she swore she
would never drink alcohol — “it was a risk calcula-
tion” — and has stuck to her guns. At her local pub
she orders the fruit-juice drink J2O: “I’m happy with
any colour, so it’s whatever the landlord gives me.”
Talk turns to acting. Riley shows her talent in Pistol,
as she did playing a “deadly sexbot” (to use Musk’s
words) in the hit HBO sci-fi series Westworld, but her
screen career has seemingly never hit its true poten-
tial and there have been recent turkeys too. Neverthe-
less she says she has no regrets about putting acting
on the back burner for Musk. Besides, only acting for
half the year allows time for hobbies. “You’re incred-
ibly time rich as a failed actor,” she says, grinning.
A self-described “jack of all trades”, as well as the
carriage driving and bellringing at her local church
(which she attends every Sunday) she also makes her
own clothes at a local craft group. On top of that she’s
currently studying, taking a maths and physics course
through the Open University, and is determined to‘I love Elon
fiercely and
always will — not
in an intense,
romantic way
but in a “he’s my
family” way’
Below, from left Riley in 2007’s St Trinian’s; and as Vivienne Westwood in Pistol with Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren
The Sunday Times Style • 15