How Dakota Johnson and Riley Keough Became BFFs as Teens in a Parking Lot

Not many can relate to growing up with extremely famous parents. Usher in Dakota Johnson and Riley Keough. Johnson (not only the daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, but granddaughter of screen icon Tippi Hedren) and Keough (Elvis’s granddaughter, and the late Lisa Marie Presley’s daugther) have been friends since their teenage years. And despite their famous lineage, they met in the most teenage way possible.

Speaking to Vanity Fair (Keough is the publication’s recent cover star) Johnson sang the praises of the 34-year-old while also revealing that the met in the parking lot of West coast fast food chain In-N-Out as teenagers. “It was like finding a soulmate,” Johnson said. “When I met her, I felt this thing that is so impossible to articulate, growing up in a famous family. There was this solidarity. Understanding.”

It makes sense that Johnson and Keough both connected so quickly. While nepo babies are seemingly everywhere nowadays, the pair were amongst the first few scions brought up in the age of paparazzi and tabloid gossip. Johnson also noted that the two friends would spend lots of time at each other’s houses, bonding over their musician dating tendencies and forming special relationships with their mothers.

“We would just smoke cigarettes with our moms,” the Fifty Shades of Grey star continued. “And they’d call each other and be like, ‘I guess she’s going to stay with you for the next four days. Call me if she needs a ride.’ I’d go to Riley’s and then leave a week later. I don’t know if that’s normal, but, yeah, just running around LA, sharing clothes, smelling like Nag Champa. Most of it involved music festivals and dating musicians, of course.”

Keough, who plays Daisy in Daisy Jones & the Six, may owe the rocker tendencies of her character to her teenage friendship with Johnson (maybe only slightly, though, as music is in her DNA after all). After hitting it off, the pair created a girl bandM and apparently, there is video footage floating around somewhere which we most definitely need to see.

"When we were 19, we started a joke band called Folky Porn,” Johnson revealed. “Riley and I both had blond hair. We were hiding out in New York after breakups. We would do three-part harmonies with my brother, Alexander, on Hank Williams songs and John Prine songs, and we'd film them on Photo Booth.”