Storm Of Nails

Riley Keough reveals her method behind those intimate scenes on 'The Girlfriend Experience'

As the star of “The Girlfriend Experience,” the sleek Starz drama about a high-end escort, Riley Keough (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Magic Mike”) interacted with a number of actors with whom she had to share much more than just dialogue.

“It was different, guy to guy,” Keough said of the multiple bedroom scenes when she stopped by The Envelope for a video chat recently. “Some of them were more nervous than others,” she noted of the various co-stars who portrayed clients of her character Christine Reade.

“I think a difficult thing about the show is constantly having to be intimate with different personalities every day, just because it takes a lot of energy— not just the sex, but the interactions with the actors. That was intense.”

“If I was reading this pilot about a man, I would be like, ‘Yeah! He’s got swagger,’” she tells TheWrap

A version of this story on Riley Keough first appeared in the print edition of TheWrap Magazine’s Miniseries/Movies Emmy Issue.

Swagger — that’s what Riley Keough has in “The Girlfriend Experience,” Starz’s limited series based on the Steven Soderbergh movie from 2009. As Christine, a student-turned-prostitute who enjoys her work, the 27-year-old actress embraced the role taken by Sasha Grey in the original film, of a strong, sexual woman unapologetic about her career.

“She’s happy with her choices,” said Keough, who also happens to be the granddaughter of Elvis Presley. “I don’t think she needs other people to make her feel better, which is very rare for a female character. If I was reading this pilot about a man, I would be like, ‘Yeah! He’s got swagger.‘”

As usual, Keough is nobody’s victim in the miniseries. “‘The Girlfriend Experience’ is about power,” she said. “Christine’s a controlling, selfish, manipulative person who channels that into her law career, and this new career that she seems to get more power out of. She’s just a very practical girl who likes sex.”

Keough met with Christine’s real-world equivalents, “girls who enjoyed it and chose to do it” — though in one way, the real Christines were different from the character. “The thing I was most interested in was, ‘Do you have feelings for your client?'” she said. “And they did. It was actually very sad, because a lot of them had stories about a client who might have feelings back, but they’d never get together. There was a sadness that really struck me.”

But if there’s any of that sadness in Christine, the audience doesn’t see it. “It didn’t go into her inner dialogue or tell you how to feel. I thought that was a very interesting thing to do to an audience.”

The original film was one of Soderbergh’s more adventurous and defiantly indie productions, and the TV version — created and written by Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, and executive produced by Soderbergh — takes a similar approach.

“The whole thing was very experimental and fun,” said Keough, who got her start in the 2010 rock movie “The Runaways.” “It was the format of independent film — tiny crew, very low lighting. I heard that TV is very rigid, you have to hit your mark, and I thought, ‘Oh, God!’ But the idea of this is to shoot it like a film. We got to do what we wanted. I think there was one Starz rep there the whole time, and they didn’t see a cut until the end.”

Like her grandfather during his largely unfortunate years in Hollywood, Keough said she is offered her share of lucrative but lousy projects. “It’s tempting financially for like 15 seconds, but I’ve never been in it for those things so I don’t have a problem,” said Keough, whose mother is Lisa Marie Presley and whose stepdads have included Nicolas Cage and Michael Jackson.