Elvis' granddaughter plays Mellie in the new movie
In Steven Soderbergh's new heist comedy Logan Lucky, rising star Riley Keough plays Mellie, the only woman in a gang that includes her brothers (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver) and an explosives expert named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig).
Keough was immediately drawn to the film's combination of humour and heart. "I loved the story," she says. "I thought it was a really, really wonderful story about this family that's coming from circumstances that aren't great, kind of beat the system and end up winning. I think people dream about that kind of thing. I love that concept! And I thought Mellie was great. It's cool for the girl to be kind of girly but also the badass driver, and so I thought it would be a fun character to play."
One scene that wasn't fun was the one in which Mellie paints cockroaches with nail polish in preparation for the heist. "It was really gross," Keough admits. "And it was really hard to do. I was actually holding cockroaches! A cockroach wrangler showed me how to hold them in a certain way. We used non-toxic nail polish, for anyone who's worried about the cockroaches. But yeah, it was disgusting."
For all of the actors, recreating the distinctive West Virginia dialect was a challenge. "I did work a bit with a dialect coach," Keough says. "And I just listened to people speaking to pick up on the little subtle things that you might not just get from doing dialect work, little nuances."
And she says that Craig provided comic relief because of how he inhabited the accent. "He was doing the voice the whole time," Keough laughs. "I think the thing is because he's English he wanted to not lose the voice. So if I saw him at the hotel after shooting he would be doing the voice. It was really funny."
She admits it was difficult to keep a straight face on set, once Craig, Tatum and Driver got going. "When I start laughing I just can't stop," she says. "And they wouldn't stop bantering between takes. It was ridiculous."
Still, she loved bringing some feminine energy to the set. "It's great. I'm happy to be the girl," she says. "It's kind of a story about these brothers and their sister and these other characters, and everyone's got their place in the heist. And I think it was kind of badass to be the driver as a woman and not just a cockroach painter, which by the way takes a lot more balls than driving!"
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