Why Riley Keough's Vanity Fair profile is the perfect nepo baby interview.

Actress Riley Keough is the cover star of Vanity Fair's September edition. The cover photograph displays her seated on a leather sofa in high-rise knitted pants, an intense stare fixed on her face, and the following caption printed between her widespread legs: "on growing up Presley, losing Lisa Marie, and inheriting Graceland." 

It's clear from the outset that this is not an interview that's going to shy away from her blessed origins.

Keough is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, daughter of Lisa Marie Presley, and, as is stated unabashedly in the first few paragraphs of the accompanying profile interview, the sole custodian of Graceland, which has been recently valued as being worth somewhere in the region of $US 500 million.  

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The profile interview, which catches Keough in Switzerland on her 34th birthday after receiving treatment for Lyme disease, scarcely touches on her acting credits (Daisy Jones and the Six, The Girlfriend Experience, Mad Max: Fury Road) and when it does, it speaks about these projects almost as passing details to the actual intrigue: her life. 

And, rare for Hollywood stars with comparable upbringings, Keough is completely happy to oblige. 

The interview walks through some of the most surreal details of her life, including hiding from tourists while staying in Graceland ("The tours would start in the morning, and we would hide upstairs until they were over") to living in Neverland (Lisa Marie Presley was married to Michael Jackson briefly from 1994 to 1995). 

Keough refers to her childhood as "extreme", recalling moments like when Michael Jackson shut down a toy store (in Paris or London, the actor can't quite remember) to buy her a teddy bear. 

"I think he really got a kick out of being able to make people happy, in the most epic way possible, which I think he and my grandfather had in common." 

The interview peers behind a door usually firmly locked to the public and gives candid insight into the world of growing up around the ultra-famous. It's a world that is, let's face it, so beyond the comprehension of average people that it feels almost alien to read about. Even in the world of the extremely famous celebrities, Keough's family stands out from the pack. 

At one point in the profile, Baz Lurhmann, who produced, wrote and directed Elvis, refers to the Presleys as one of the "royal families of America" – the other being the Kennedys. 

Keough says she understands only in hindsight just how wild and unrelatable those aspects of her childhood were. It's also evident in the company she keeps that she always had a strong need to connect with other kids caught in the whirlwind. The profile reveals Keough's best friends since childhood, all noted nepo babies: Kristen Stewart, Zoë Kravitz, and Dakota Johnson. 

Keough wears the ridiculousness of these friendships in a video accompanying the cover story; speaking about her history with Kravitz, she laughs that their parents were friends since both women were really young, "So we would hang out as nepo babies, literally." 

The candour of the interview about Keough's family and privileges is a deeply refreshing contrast from the nepo content that has come before. Asked about their family status and wealth, too many celebrities have, to put it rather crudely, shown their whole asses. They've reasserted what we would have likely come to assume about them anyway: that they must be wholly affected by privilege. 

Asked by Elle about her family background, Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of model Vanessa Paradis and actor Johnny Depp) claimed "It just doesn't make any sense. If somebody's mum or dad is a doctor, and then the kid becomes a doctor, you're not going to be like, 'Well, you're only a doctor because your parent is a doctor.' It's like, 'No, I went to medical school and trained.'" 

Speaking to fellow prominent nepo baby last year, Hailey Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow claimed on the model's YouTube series that while being the child of famous parents (Paltrow is the daughter of actors Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow) may get your foot in the door but "once your foot is in the door – which you unfairly got in – then you have to work almost twice as heard and be twice as good because people are ready to pull you down and say you don't belong there." 

And Jamie Lee Curtis (daughter of actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis) appeared to get miffed about the topic on her Instagram page when she asserted that the conversation about nepo babies is "just designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt." 

Watch the trailer for Daisy Jones and the Six below. Article continues after video. 

What Keough gets right in her Vanity Fair interview is her blatant self-awareness and her generosity with her narrative. To borrow a phrase from neoliberal feminism, she leans in. And in doing so, Keogh clarifies what the nepo baby dialogue is ultimately asking of celebrities, which is not necessarily 'Are they talented enough?' It's more 'Do they understand us?' 

Keough knows she's talented (because she is) but she also seems patently aware of all of the absurd power structures that have smoothed the course of her life thus far. She doesn't apologise for the way she's benefited from them, but she's happy to recognise it.

And maybe her grounded thought process around this conversation is in part due to the fact that her life has been struck by multiple tragedies: the death of her younger brother, Benjamin Keough at 27 years old to suicide, and the death of her mother, Lisa Marie, earlier this year following complications related to weight-loss surgery. 

Despite her fame and fortune (or perhaps in ways, because of it), Keough has endured a lot of heartache and grief in her 34 years. And the nepo baby discourse, while at times glib, has never tried to suggest that celebrities aren't just real people who face their own horrors like the rest of us. 

Keough just seems to get it. She knows that talking about nepo babies doesn't necessarily seek to diminish celebrities (as Curtis suggests) or to try and take something away from them. While the dialogue represents broader commentary about privilege and wealth disparity, to be a nepo baby isn't always a badge of shame. 

Contrary to what some celebrities might believe, the public are able to hold two ideas in their heads at the same time: that some people can get a really unfair leg-up and also be talented.  

In fact, plenty of nepo babies are beloved – Keough's own good friend Dakota Johnson (daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) has become an adored meme in recent years for going toe-to-toe with Ellen Degeneres (a widely despised non-nepo) and showing off a bowl of decorative limes that she doesn't eat in her designer home during an Architectural Digest visit. 

Keough isn't afraid of who she is, she doesn't duck and dive – because to try and do so would be, well, hilarious. And it's in this abject lack of defensiveness that the audience is rewarded with what many of us wanted all along, which is just some really great stories about fancy rich people we will never ever meet. 

Elfy Scott is an executive editor at Mamamia. 

Image: Vanity Fair.