Bugs Really Make Riley Keough Bug Out

The first time we meet Riley Keough in Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, she's speaking a mile a minute as hairdresser Mellie Logan. She eventually teams with her brothers (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver) to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway—in which she rattles off her tips for avoiding traffic. The resulting caricature is a hilarious hybrid between SNL's "The Californians" sketch and My Cousin Vinny's car enthusiast Mona Lisa Vito, all by way of West Virginia.

Talking on the phone Monday to promote the movie, Keough isn't quite as loquacious as her on-screen alter-ego. The actress first worked with Soderbergh on 2012's Magic Mike, but the past couple of years have been proof of the wealth of her talent thanks to varied roles in the Soderbergh-executive produced TV series The Girlfriend Experience, Trey Edward Shults's It Comes at Night, and Andrea Arnold's American Honey.

Logan Lucky is an invigorating movie that marks the end of Soderbergh's professed retirement from feature filmmaking. It's also been the subject of sleuthing: The Hollywood Reporter uncovered that the screenwriter, credited as Rebecca Blunt, doesn't appear to be an actual person. We asked Keough about that as well having to paint roaches with nail polish. (It's all part of the scheme.)

VICE: There was one of scene of yours that I had a visceral physical reaction to: When it was revealed you were painting roaches with nail polish.
Riley Keough: Oh yes. I had a reaction to that too. It was really disgusting.

Did you actually have to handle the roaches?
Yeah, yeah, that was all real. I was holding cockroaches.

Were you at all OK with that?
To be honest, I want to tell you I was OK with it, and I'm a badass, and it was all good. But it was actually disgusting. The way that they feel, it just feels wrong. The way they move. It's just really creepy. They're gross.

You've worked with Steven Soderbergh so much at this point. But how did he approach you with Logan Lucky? Were you surprised he was back to doing a feature film?
Yeah, I think so. I was a little bit. I'd worked with him on Magic Mike, and then we did The Girlfriend Experience so I'd been working with him, so in my mind I wasn't like, Oh, you're, you know, retired. He just sent me an email and said, "Do you want to do this movie?" And I said, "Sure." I didn't know anything about it. And he said, "Alright, I'll send you this script."

When he sent you the script, what were your initial reactions to Mellie, and how did you go about finding her character?
I think that's what was interesting. When I read it, I didn't really know. She's kind of reads girlie, but she's kind of tough. I was like, "Wait, OK, is this like a girlie girl, or is this like a tough, driving badass kind of girl?" Then I was like, "She's kind of both," which was cool. I was having a hard time being like, what simple woman character is this? Is this the badass or the hairdresser? But then she's kind of both. I like that. She's not simple.

She's doesn't easily fit into any box.
Totally, when you really look at it she's just a Southern girl who likes doing hair, and she's a good driver.

Were you familiar at all with the region before coming to the film?
Yeah, I have friends in West Virginia. I've been to West Virginia a bunch. So I was very familiar with it and all the colorful characters in West Virginia.

What did you want to bring out about it? What do you think the movie brought out about it?
Southern people are really wild and colorful and funny. And they know they're funny, and they are such characters. So just to put a heist movie within that world is just something I've never even heard of before so that was fun.

What was the experience of being on set, having all these people coming together and portraying the teamwork of the heist movie scenario? It's such a fun thing to watch on-screen. When it's all coming together does it feel more technical or does it have that fun quality?
No, you can feel that fun quality. You can feel it, and you can feel like what it's going to translate to. We've all seen Ocean's Eleven. You do feel that energy when it's happening. It's fun. You definitely feel it when you're shooting it, for sure.

The media is so taken with the mystery surrounding the movie's writer Rebecca Blunt. What do you think about that? Why do you think that is?
Because there's no mystery anymore in anything, and everyone knows everything about everything. People [feel] like they have to know, but they'll never know and that's fantastic.

So you think we'll never know what's real and what's not in that story with Rebecca?
Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I don't think anyone will ever know. Unless Steven has a change of heart one day.

The movie is such a romp, but it's also about economic anxiety in this day and age. I couldn't help thinking about who the Logans might have voted for in the election, given the current climate. Did you view it at all through a political lens when you were making it?
You know, I always view things through a political lens just because that's something I think about a lot. But I don't know who they would have voted for. I don't know if it's necessary. I know that they're in a financial situation that a lot of Americans would be in and that was more interesting to me, looking at somebody who is stuck in the system, and they can't get out, and they end up winning and beating the system.

What was it like filming at the Charlotte Motor Speedway?
It was wild. It's not a world that I've had a lot of experience in. It was really wildly interesting and also really loud. I was blown away by how loud it was.

Did you do your own driving? How did you get into the Mellie driving mindset?
I had to learn to drive stick because I didn't know how to do that. That was really helpful. I started driving stick around Atlanta. I practiced in LA a bunch. That was really helpful because I'm not an amazing driver. That was really important for Mellie.

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