She grew up between Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Graceland and her father’s trailer park. But actor Riley Keough is amazingly grounded, finds Sanjiv Bhattacharya

A couple of months ago, Riley Keough turned 28, so she went out for a celebratory dinner with friends and family. “I drank some wine,” she shrugs. “But I don’t like drinking, really. I have so much to do and it’s hard to function with a hangover.” She thinks for a moment. “Actually, I don’t like dinners either. Such a waste of time. I like eating, but I don’t like that it’s this whole experience, like picking a restaurant and going there and like sitting at a table…”

She speaks in a quiet, halting voice, grinning as though amused by how her idiosyncratic opinions sound when she says them out loud, and by the bizarre fact that most people actually enjoy food. Which is ironic, considering she’s Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, but we’ll get to that.

She sits calmly on a sofa in a Hollywood photo studio, with her flame red hair and denim shorts, and an expression that says, “Isn’t life curious?”

The prosaic explanation is that Keough hasn’t got time for dinners, not with six movies coming out in 2017. “I’m a workaholic,” she explains. “Very highly strung.” She’s so busy, she’s concerned that her anonymity may be in jeopardy. Her break came in The Runaways in 2010 with Dakota Fanning, then she landed a part in Mad Max: Fury Road alongside Zoë Kravitz and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. But it was her performance in The Girlfriend Experience, the Steven Soderbergh-produced series about an escort/law intern, that had critics applauding like seals. She’s a real and complicated anti-heroine, and the Golden Globe nomination was richly deserved.

So now, she’s everywhere. Today, we’re meant to be talking about Logan Lucky (out this month), one of five films she has coming out this year. But first, there’s this tattoo on her wrist that needs an explanation – four dots and a square beneath what looks like the Led Zeppelin symbol. “Yeah, that’s Mayan. It means I’m a Self-Existing World Bridger – which is quite a serious job.” On top of everything else? “See? That’s why no dinners.”

Logan Lucky is her third project with Soderbergh (Magic Mike was the first) and, as always, she jumped in without seeing the script: “Anyone would, it’s not a twist-my-arm-scenario.” It’s a rollicking heist movie – as is expected of Mr Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen – in which Keough plays Channing Tatum’s sister and accomplice in a grand Nascar rip-off. For Keough, however, the character came easy. Though she’s a Cali Valley girl and proud, she has family all over the South, in Memphis in particular. On Graceland Avenue. I’m not meant to dwell on her family today – her publicist is right outside the (open) door, ready to pounce if I focus too much on her mother Lisa Marie and her ex-husbands Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – but it’s fair to say that a familiarity with the South is the very least interesting thing about her upbringing.

She grew up between the Graceland Estate and the Neverland Ranch. She’d be hanging out with Michael Jackson and his llamas one minute, and travelling to school with an armed security detail the next. Not to mention Lisa Marie’s Scientology (she’s no longer a member), or the Nicolas Cage marriage that lasted a full 108 days. And yet, by some miracle, she seems perfectly sane. I suggest gently that she’s not quite how I expected her to be, and she grins. “I think I’ve had a more complex life than people are aware of.”