Lisa Marie Presley gave advice to Riley Keough about being a celebrity child

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Riley Keoughdaughter of the deceased Lisa Marie Presley and granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, shared some meaningful but direct advice her mother gave her about being a celebrity child.

Keough, 35, appeared on the Wednesday, Dec. 11 episode of Podknustwhere she explained to hosts Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin how Lisa Marie’s words stuck with her.

“My mother was very intense about being a celebrity’s child,” he said Under the Bridge said actress. “She was basically like, ‘If you’re going to do something, you’re going to be a joke to a lot of people. So if you’re going to do something, you have to be really good at it. You can’t just try it.’

“I felt a lot of pressure, I think. And so it was kind of in my head and in my brother’s head,” Keough added. “She was very much like, ‘You can’t just be a famous kid. If you’re going to act or sing or whatever you’re going to do, you’ve got to be better at it or as good as everybody else’.”

Keough pointed out that both she and her late brother Benjamin, who died in 2020 at the age of 27, kept Lisa Marie’s words close and worked hard to prove themselves. Lisa Marie died in January 2023 at age 54 of bowel obstruction.

Although Keough chose to go down the acting path, she has been incredibly busy and successful. Over the past few years, she appeared in films like 2015’s Mad Max: Fury RoadThe 2016s American honeyand the 2020s Zola. Keough also starred as the title character in Amazon Prime’s Daisy Jones & The Sixa fictional series inspired by Fleetwood Mac, which allowed the actress to display her inherited vocal talent.

Outside of Keough’s career, she married stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen in 2015. The couple met while filming Mad Max: Fury Road back in 2012. In 2022, Keough and Smith-Petersen welcomed their daughter, Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen.

“It’s funny because we chose her name before the Elvis movie,” Keough said in an August 2023 story for Vanity Fair. “I thought, ‘This is great because it’s not really a familiar word or name in terms of my family — it’s not like Memphis or anything’.”