Riley Keough is opening up about the special meaning of her daughter’s name.
The “Daisy Jones & the Six” star, 34, welcomed her first child with her husband, Australian stuntman and actor Ben Smith-Petersen, in August 2022.
In a recent Vanity Fair cover story, she revealed the baby’s name for the first time: Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen.
She explained that her daughter’s middle name honors Keough’s late brother, Benjamin Storm Keough, who died at age 27 in 2020.
“He, in a lot of ways, felt like my twin,” Keough said of her brother. “We were very connected and very similar. He was much quicker and wittier and a little smarter than me.”
She also called her late brother a “very special soul.”
Her daughter’s first name, Tupelo, honors the Mississippi town where Keough’s grandfather, Elvis Presley, was famously born.
“It’s funny because we picked her name before the Elvis movie,” Keough told Vanity Fair. “I was like, ‘This is great because it’s not really a well-known word or name in relation to my family—it’s not like Memphis or something.’
“Then when the Elvis movie came out, it was like, Tupelo this and Tupelo that,” she continued. “I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ But it’s fine.”
Keough and her husband, who met in 2013 while working on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” welcomed their daughter privately via surrogate last year.
She opened up about her decision to use a surrogate.
“I think it’s a very cool, selfless, and incredible act that these women do to help other people,” she said. “I can carry children, but it felt like the best choice for what I had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff.”
Elsewhere in her Vanity Fair interview, Keough shared that she has Lyme disease, a condition that can trigger an autoimmune response, or whose symptoms may mimic an autoimmune disease, according to the Autoimmune Association.
The first time the couple publicly mentioned having a daughter was at the funeral of Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley, in January 2023.
Presley died at 54 on Jan. 12 after experiencing a small bowel obstruction.
At the memorial service for Presley, Smith-Petersen read out a eulogy on behalf of his wife.
“I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters,” Keough’s eulogy read, in part. “Thank you for giving me strength, my heart, my empathy, my courage, my sense of humor, my manners, my temper, my wildness, my tenacity. I’m a product of your heart.”
In her recent Vanity Fair interview, Keough recalled knowing very early on that she would have children with Smith-Petersen.
“I remember it so vividly, I just knew that we were going to have kids,” she said. “It was, in hindsight, very strange. I didn’t know how we’d get there, but we did.”
Keough also opened up about her approach to parenthood.
“This is the thing in my life so far that I have really wanted to, quote-unquote, get right,” she said. “I don’t think you ever can be a perfect parent, but I would like to be the best mom for her that I can be.”
