In Logan Lucky, Riley Keough Takes the Wheel

The feeling you get when you meet Riley Keough is that she’s been around; that she knows a few people outside New York and L.A. It’s something directors, in particular, note right off. “I almost ruined the take when she said her first lines as Mellie Logan,” says Steven Soderbergh. Mellie Logan is the character Keough plays in Logan Lucky, the director’s exquisite new Nascar–meets–Ocean’s Eleven heist caper set in the Appalachians. “I said, ‘Who are you thinking of?’ And she said, ‘Oh, a friend in West Virginia.’ ” Andrea Arnold, who directed her in last year’s acclaimed independent American Honey, noticed it, too: In that movie, Keough plays the boss of a band of teenagers traveling through Midwestern towns selling magazine subscriptions. “We were all together in the van,” says Arnold, “and she just seemed at home wherever we went, like she’s lived some other lives.”