For Keough, the name Abbey Lee held no connotations of
fashion and modelling. There was a time when Keough was
intimately involved with those worlds, but her interests have since
evolved with age. She started early, signing up to a modelling
agency in early 2004 when she was only 14 years old – the same
age when her grandmother Priscilla Presley met her grandfather.
The early noughties were an era when other young women with
instantly recognisable pedigrees, such as Paris Hilton and Nicole
Richie, were gaining celebrity, fame and notoriety. So as Elvis
Presley’s pretty, LA-born-and-bred granddaughter, with Michael
Jackson as her stepfather, she ticked all the boxes: the glamour, the
scandal, the sheer curiosity factor. It soon led her to walk the
runways for Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Dior and to feature
on numerous magazine covers, yet Keough was wise enough to
stay away from trouble. “She’s actually got so much class. She’s
very graceful and has this sort of Grace Kelly-esque thing to her.
She has had this elegance and finesse since she was a baby,” said
Lisa Marie Presley of her then 14-year-old daughter, a fact that
still stands. “She’s not one of those Hollywood pretentious kids.”
In person she has a delicate beauty highlighted
by the same arresting blue eyes as her
grandmother. It’s a beauty almost too subtle to
be captured in still images, but an advantage
for film. She’s chatty and personable: when
I express casual concern that the background
noise w i l l ma ke it d i ffic u lt to hea r t he record ing,
she takes my Dictaphone and holds it close to
her mouth while she juggles eating her lunch.
“I’m interested in fashion but not to the point
where I could have an opinion, so I hate being
asked dumb questions like: ‘What’s your ideal
jacket?’” she says, rolling her eyes. “I feel like
every interview asks me those things.” When the cast for Mad Max
was announced, Keough did what we’re all wont to do and Googled
Abbey Lee. “I thought: ‘She’s so pretty and cool and like, eight feet
tall! How am I going to do a movie with her?’” she says, laughing at
the thought. So it was fitting that she next spotted Abbey Lee not in
person, but on a billboard. “I was driving down Sunset [Boulevard]
and she was there for Gucci, and I was like: ‘That’s the girl!’”
Abbey Lee had no such illusions about Keough. It’s difficult to tell
whether it’s because she is too composed to reveal them, or perhaps
Keough’s family failed to reach Abbey Lee’s sphere of awareness –
there’s an ethereal, fragile quality to her, as if she’s not quite of this
world in both spirit and appearance. Though clearly striking, with
her wide-set large eyes and perennially youthful face, she pinpoints
her malleability as her strength in modelling. “Someone once told
me that I wasn’t striking, and, um, it was somebody that I loved,
so that hurt quite a bit,” she deliberates. “I can look raw and boyish,
or I can have a face full of make-up and carry it.” It’s a factor that
she’s played up herself. “I’ve been everything. I’ve been a goth,
a raver. I’ve gone through everything because it’s interesting and
fun to play around with your image.” She has shades of New Age-
y-ness, at one point fashioning herself like a modern-day Stevie
Nicks with her long blonde hair, fringed shawls of paisley print,
devoré velvet and fascination with talisman necklaces. “There’s an
inner hippie in me, it’s very innate. If I never had to wear shoes
again I’d be over the moon, and I love to be in the dirt.”
But on her feet now, as always, are the heavy black Doc Martens-
style boots. Her delicacy is balanced by a tougher outer shell that
is initially wary and cold and ever so slightly brittle. It’s a shell
that one might immediately pinpoint to her time as a model. It’s
part of her process of self-preservation. “Modelling is ballsy, you
know? You have to grow-up really fucking quick. You start
working, you build a career at a young age that’s filled with adults,
and you’re not an adult. You have to you learn how to say no,” she
says, slamming the brakes (again, and again), in between
complaining about fellow commuters. “Look, modelling served
me in a lot of ways, but it was also limiting and restricting to my
needs. I got fucking tired of being asked what’s in my handbag.”
Did she enjoy it? Flashing a quick look at me, she pauses. “I’m
going to get in trouble if I answer that honestly.” She does attest
though that she’s benefited from the “fruits of modelling”, allowing
her to be financially secure with no need to take film roles for the
money – in particular allowing her to bypass the usual “girl-next-
door, rom-com type shit – I would be terrible at it anyway”. It’s
a privilege that Keough also shares because of her background and
also the startlingly assured sense of self she has, behind all the
giggles and candour. “The roles that get you attention are the
attractive girlfriend, the hot girls,” says Keough, who has played
neither. “For every actress it’s really hard, frustrating and emotional,
because they’re sensitive to looking or being
a certain way. I’m not sensitive to it, but I see
it affect my friends. They get so crazy-obsessed
thinking they’re never pretty enough, never
good enough, never talented enough.”
Keough and Abbey Lee first met in a New
York airport lounge waiting for a flight to
Namibia where shooting for Mad Max: Fury
Road was about to commence. “When you
first meet Riley she’s got a very soft demeanour,
she’s very gentle and sweet,” remembers
Abbey Lee. “I’m ... harder,” she says slowly,
seeking the exact word for which to
differentiate herself. “I was so nervous because I’d never done
a film before.” Keough only approached her after toing and froing
with her friend and fellow cast member Zoë Kravitz. “We were
being weird and girlie and trying to make eye contact with her.
I wanted us to introduce ourselves even though Zoë thought it
would have been awkward,” says Keough. “She was really pale and
had white hair. She looked like a giant elf.” Keough is quick to tell
you the facts of any story, and has the ability to recount memories
with sharp precision: who initiated conversation, what they spoke
about, how it happened. By the time they landed in Africa the two
had become firm friends. “The connection was pretty fast,”
explains Abbey Lee. “It was a really tough film to shoot so it makes
it easier to have someone that you’re close to [on set].”
Earlier this year Keough asked Abbey Lee to be her bridesmaid
at her wedding with Ben Smith-Petersen, the Byron Bay-born
stuntman whom she had met on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Their romantic relationship was a slow burn, marred with youthful
misunderstanding of intentions and coalescing into Keough and
Smith-Petersen spending time together during reshoots in
Australia in 2013. He proposed in 2014 with a diamond from his
mother reset into a new ring for Keough. The pair are famously low-
key: a month before the wedding they visited Nepal and helped
build schools for “untouchables”. They married in February and
the bride wore a long-sleeved lace gown by French designer
Delphine Manivet; the guests and bridal party were advised to
wear black. “The wedding was beautiful, it had an almost gothic
feel to it because it was in a cave,” describes Abbey Lee. “I told her
if she didn’t make me a bridesmaid I’d chop her head off,” she says
with a smirk. “I don’t think we even talked about it,” clarifies“RILEY AND ME
... IT DOESN’T
MATTER WHAT
WE’RE DOING AS
LONG WE’RE IN
EACH OTHER’S
PRESENCE”136 – MAY 2015