All shook up! Ben Smith-Petersen’s relationship with wife Riley Keough has been burning since the beginning.
“Two weeks into dating him, we were at a gas station and I was like, ‘I could see myself having kids with this person,’” Keough told USA Today in April 2016, noting that she met Smith-Petersen while working on Mad Max: Fury Road four years prior. “It was kind of like I knew I was meeting my husband. It was very cool.”
The Daisy Jones & the Six star added: “We’re obsessed with each other, but it was deeper than that. I always felt comfortable around him. You know when you feel weird when you first start dating someone, or like you don’t want to eat in front of them, you wake up and put make up on or something weird? I just always felt very comfortable with him, always wanted to be near him, even from the beginning.”
Elvis Presley’s granddaughter later recalled the early days of her romance with Smith-Petersen in an essay for Vogue Australia, which was published in May 2022.
“We had a couple of drinks and I remember we had a connection. He started salsa dancing with me and teaching me, because he grew up dancing,” Keough wrote of a romantic evening the twosome shared in Australia. “It was such a fun night. A few of us went to one of the bays for a swim and it was really magic.”
She continued: “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.”
The couple got engaged in August 2014. Us Weekly confirmed in February 2015 that the lovebirds tied the knot in Napa, California.
“7 years of RAD luck,” Smith-Petersen wrote via Instagram in February 2022, gushing over his wife on their anniversary. “I love you to the moon & back. 7,000 more years please.”
Three months later, he sang Keough’s praises once again in celebration of her 33rd birthday. “Happy Birthday Beanz,” the Manodrome second unit director wrote via social media at the time. “You get better & better every year ❤️.”
When Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley, died at age 54 in January 2023, Smith-Petersen was by the Runaways star’s side. During the late musician’s memorial at Graceland that month, he read a eulogy penned by his spouse and revealed that the couple recently became parents. (Us confirmed after the memorial that the Zola actress secretly gave birth in 2022.)
“Thank you for showing me that love is the only thing that matters in this life. I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters,” Smith-Petersen said in the speech. “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.”
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