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Daisy Jones & the Six star Riley Keough has been married to her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, for about nine years—and their love story is very sweet and quite adventurous. Keough says she knew that she and Smith-Petersen were destined to be together very early on, after they met on set together. Ahead is everything that you need to know about Smith-Petersen, as well as all of the details about his relationship with Keough.
Smith-Petersen is an award-winning stuntman.
Per his IMDb page, Smith-Petersen has done stunt work on blockbuster films, like Barbie, Suicide Squad, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and The Great Gatsby.
He was nominated for a SAG Award for Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture for Barbie and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and won the award for his role in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Keough and Smith-Petersen met on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road
Keough talked about her love story with Vogue Australia in May 2022. So the story goes, she flew to Australia in December 2013 to film reshoots for Mad Max. They had originally filmed in Namibia, where she first met Smith-Petersen.
“I knew who he was, but I was in a relationship, so I wasn’t looking at anyone in that way,” she said. By the time she was in Australia, she was single and ready to enjoy herself on a nice trip.
“I was just out of a relationship that I needed to recover from, so definitely wasn’t looking for anything. Ben was on set, and I saw him. It had been a year, and he just felt more grown up, and there was something about him. I was like, ‘Oh wow,’” she recalled. “He felt so much more mature. We were in Fox Studios in Sydney. He came up to me and said, ‘Can I send you my music to listen to?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ I told him, ‘I’m here for a month, I don’t have much to do…maybe you could teach me to surf?’ Which is hilarious, because I’m so terrified of sharks and I would never surf now.”
A few days later, Keough invited Smith-Petersen over to her friend’s house for a get-together.
“We ended up kissing that night, and the next day we went to Camp Cove and got in the water, and I hugged him, and it felt like I didn’t want to be away from him. I just felt so comfortable. This was our first day hanging out after we kissed! We were in the water and looking around at all the beautiful houses, and we started making a joke about ‘when we get married, which house should we buy?’ It was a silly joke because we had only hung out for a day. But in hindsight, it’s funny because we did get married.”
Keough seemed to know that he was the one for her very early on.
“We were so young. He was 22, and I was 24, just getting coffee and smoking cigarettes without a care in the world. I remember as he walked out of the gas station, I so strongly had this feeling, and it was, ‘That’s the father of your children.’ It was so crazy because we had only really hung out for a week,” she explained.
Eventually, the time came for Keough to return home.
“And then my time was up. The last night together we were on the trampoline in his family’s backyard, looking at the stars. It was still so early that we weren’t being forward, but I knew I was in love with him,” she remembered. “He drove me to the airport and I just said, ‘Why don’t you come to England with me?’ And he was like, ‘I could.’ I flew to England, and then 24 hours later he got on a flight and met me there, and he never went home.”
Keough and Smith-Petersen got matching tattoos right after they met.
In the same Vogue article, Keough shared that, “falling in love in Australia was amazing.” She and Smith-Petersen went on many adventures together, and one of their biggest ones occurred only a few days after they met.
“We got matching tattoos the third day we hung out, just for fun, never thinking the relationship would go anywhere,” she said, although she didn’t share what the couple got or where. Shortly after that, Keough realized that she was falling in love.
That’s not the only tattoo that Smith-Petersen has dedicated to Keough. In September 2021, he posted a picture of Keough tugging down the waistband of his pants to reveal her name, Riley, permanently inked on his lower torso.
Smith-Petersen and Keough got married in 2015.
Keough and Smith-Petersen had quite the whirlwind romance.
“We moved in together after two months, and six months in he asked me to marry him, and then we were married a year later,” Keough told Vogue, mapping out the timeline. “Technically, our first wedding was in Nepal, because we were there building a school a couple of weeks before we got married. The families knew we were getting married and they said, ‘Let us throw you a Hindu wedding.’ It was so beautiful and, in some ways, that wedding was a little more intimate and really special. That wedding, I cried. At my bigger wedding I was a little nervous, I wasn’t as present. But it was still equally as amazing.”
Smith-Petersen and Keough share a daughter together.
In August 2022, Keough and Smith-Petersen welcomed their daughter via surrogate. The news first broke at the funeral of Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley. Smith-Petersen read a eulogy on his wife’s behalf, who was too upset to do so herself. He read: “I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters. 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.”
Keough revealed to Vanity Fair that their daughter is named Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen, named after Elvis Presley’s Mississippi birthplace. Her middle name comes from Keough’s late brother, Benjamin Storm Keough, who passed when she was 27.
As for her decision to have a baby through surrogacy, Keough said, “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.”
Keough had to film a sex scene with Smith-Petersen for Daisy Jones and the Six.
While Smith-Petersen typically does stunt work, he had an acting cameo on Daisy Jones & the Six, which Keough spoke about on Late Night With Seth Meyers.
“The cameo came about, because I have to have intercourse with a random person in the show,” she explained. “And the producers were, like, ‘It would be so funny if it was your husband.”
Meyers asked her what the experience was like.
“It was more awkward!” she laughed. “Because, I mean, like, for one, I’ve never had pretend sex with my husband.”
She explained how, typically, sex scenes are very professional, but “with him it was just, like, really we were giggling the whole time.”
“I feel like I really kept feeling inclined to be like, ‘In real life, it’s not like this,” she joked as the audience laughed. “And then I was like, ‘I’ll just, you know, keep that to myself.’”