When it came to naming her first child, Riley Keough wanted something meaningful, with ties to her family.
However, with a family as famous as hers — her grandparents being none other than Elvis and Priscilla Presley — it isn't as easy to find a name that hasn't been popularized by Elvis fans in the last 50 years.
The Daisy Jones & the Six actress and her husband Ben Smith-Petersen, who she married in 2015, believed they had struck gold with the name Tupelo, but then came the Elvis movie.
© GettyRiley first revealed her daughter's name, Tupelo Storm, to Vanity Fair in 2023, eight months after she first revealed she privately welcomed a baby girl via surrogacy at her mom Lisa Marie Presley's funeral in Graceland in January.
The sweet name honors two of the most significant men in her life, first her legendary grandfather, Tupelo being the late King of Rock's birthplace in Mississippi, and second, her brother Benjamin, whose middle name was Storm, and who passed away from suicide aged 27 in July 2020.
Speaking with VF about the name, she revealed the little mishap she ran into, explaining: "It's funny because we picked her name before the Elvis movie," referring to the Baz Luhrmann biopic starring Austin Butler that premiered a month before her daughter's birth.
© InstagramShe further shared: "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," before joking: "Then when the Elvis movie came out, it was like, Tupelo this and Tupelo that. I was like, 'Oh, no.' But it's fine."
Riley welcomed her daughter via surrogacy, and at the time, told the outlet of the process: "I think it's a very cool, selfless, and incredible act that these women do to help other people. I can carry children, but it felt like the best choice for what I had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff." (She has previously shared she was diagnosed with Lyme disease).
© Getty ImagesShe also said her daughter is the spitting image of her husband Ben, joking: "She's literally like someone shrunk my husband and that's our baby," though she added that when it comes to her iconic red hair, she can already see herself at the very least in her daughter's growing curls.
Little Tupelo will be three years old in August. Riley, speaking last year in Los Angeles during a book tour for From Here to the Great Unknown, her mother's posthumous memoir that she helped finish, opened up about her parenting style, sharing: "I think that I always say it's this southern style of parenting, but it's actually very specifically my family," per People.
© Getty"I think it is from the south, but whatever way [my mom] was parented was how I was parented in a sense. And I also now sort of parent that way," she explained.
Riley detailed much about her family's parenting style in her mother's book, and further shared: "It's really loving and tactile and smothering — no boundaries."
