Riley Keough confirms daughter’s name, says surrogacy was ‘best choice’ amid Lyme disease battle
Riley Keough has broken her silence on her now-10-month-old daughter’s August 2022 birth via surrogate — and confirmed the little one’s name.
In her Aug.15 Vanity Fair cover story, published Tuesday, the actress explained how using a gestational carrier was the “best choice” to grow her family as she battles Lyme disease.
“I think it’s a very cool, selfless and incredible act that these women do to help other people,” the “Daisy Jones and the Six” actress, 34, told the magazine.
“I can carry children,” she clarified, “but it felt like the best choice for what I had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff.”
Keough also confirmed that she named her daughter Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen, which Page Six previously revealed.
The Golden Globe nominee, who first revealed her diagnosis in a March interview with Net-A-Porter, gave birth in August 2022, but news of her arrival didn’t get out for another five months
“This is the thing in my life so far I have really wanted to, quote-unquote, get right,” she gushed on Tuesday. “I don’t think you can ever be a perfect parent, but I would like to be the best mom for her that I can be. That’s very important to me.”
Keough noted that her little one looks “like someone shrunk” husband Ben Smith-Petersen, whom she married in 2015 — but she sees herself in Tupelo’s curls.
As for her daughter’s name, it honors Keough’s grandfather Elvis Presley’s Mississippi hometown. The Emmy nominee chose the moniker before Austin Butler starred in “Elvis” in June 2022.
“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 it’s Memphis or something,” she recalled. “Then … it was like, Tupelo this and Tupelo that. I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ But it’s fine.”
The little one’s middle name, meanwhile, is a tribute to Keough’s late brother, Benjamin, who died by suicide in July 2020.
“When I lost my brother, there was no road map whatsoever, and it was a lot of big emotions that I didn’t know what to do with,” Keough told the magazine.
She explained that her brother’s passing actually helped prepare her for mom Lisa Marie Presley’s January 2023 death.
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“When I lost my mom, I was familiar with the process a little bit more, and I found working to be really helpful.”
She also touched briefly on being named the sole heir of Lisa Marie’s estate after a months-long legal battle with grandma Priscilla Presley.
While she said the duo’s dynamic experienced “upheaval” and is “complicated,” Keough confirmed that they “will be happy” now that “clarity has been had.”
She explained, “We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family.”
