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Riley Keough has revealed how her mother, the singer and actor Lisa Marie Presley, inspired her performance in the hit mini-series, Daisy Jones and the Six.
Keough starred in the musical drama as the title character Daisy Jones, an aspiring musician who joins a rock band in Los Angeles during the Seventies.
Appearing at a book event in London to promote Lisa Marie’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown – which recounts her upbringing as the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley – Keough shared that her mum didn’t manage to watch the show before her death.
“Daisy Jones actually reminded me of my mum a lot – when I read [the script] for the first time, there were so many things [they] had in common,” Keough said.
“Her personality was similar to my mum’s, her life, her writing, not being taken seriously as a writer… So I really think she was a [big] inspiration for that character, and then she sadly never got to see it.”
Keough, 35, said she told her mum that she would enjoy the show while she was filming it, but she sadly died shortly before its release: “I said it was gonna remind her of herself. But she passed away two months before it came out.”
She said it was “very hard” to deal with the aftermath of Lisa Marie’s death while also needing to promote the show, but had found comfort in being around her friends and co-stars: “Doing the press with the band and Daisy Jones was actually very fun and uplifting.”
Released on Amazon Prime Video, the series received positive reviews from critics, who singled out Keough along with her co-star, Sam Claflin, who played the band’s lead singer Billy Dunne.
It was also a hit among viewers and topped Amazon Prime Video’s most-watched list in the US within hours of its release. Fleetwood Mac star Stevie Nicks, whose tumultuous relationship with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham was said to have inspired the original novel, also praised the series.
“In the beginning, it wasn’t really my story, but Riley seamlessly, soon became my story,” she wrote in a social media post. “It brought back memories that made me feel like a ghost watching my own story... It was very emotional.”
Keough ended up completing her mum’s memoir after her death by listening to recorded interviews and adding her own recollections of their family life.
In one chapter, she recalled her mum’s last conversation with her second husband, pop star Michael Jackson.
She said that Lisa Marie realised she needed to end her relationship with the King of Pop after a near-disaster where the family’s private plane almost went down “in the middle of nowhere” as they were travelling to visit Jackson, who was on tour in South Africa.
“[It] felt like a bad omen to my mum,” Keough wrote.
Years later, Jackson called Lisa Marie: “He didn’t sound sober.”
“You were right,” Jackson is said to have told Keough’s mother. “Everybody around me wants to kill me.”
That was their last conversation, Keough wrote. “My mom was in London, writing a record, when Michael died. My mom later told Oprah that Michael often said he was afraid of ending up like her father.
“He was forever asking my mom about when Elvis died, how it happened, where, why. Michael said: ‘I feel like I’m going to end up the same way.’”
Meanwhile, Lisa Marie claimed that Jackson, whom she married in 1994 and divorced just over a year later, could be “very controlling and calculating”.
“He had wanted me to have his children so badly and I didn’t want to,” she wrote. “I knew that he ultimately wanted to be the only caretaker of the children. Michael wanted to control things. He didn’t want a mother influence, or any other influence, in fact.
“I figured that Michael would have me have the children and then dump me, get me out of the picture. I could read him like a clock. I understood everything about him because all we did was bare our souls to one another. I knew his nature.”
From Here to the Great Unknown is out now.
