No one can exactly accuse Talulah Riley of being predictable when it comes to the men she chooses. She has been married not once but twice to one of the richest men in the world.
Then, after leaving Elon Musk, whom she married in 2010, divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and divorced again in 2016, she moved on to old-school illustrator Matthew Rice, 23 years her senior and ex-husband of ceramics queen Emma Bridgewater.
Now Riley, 37, who rose to fame playing a schoolgirl in the St Trinian films, is engaged to baby-faced actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster. The British actress timely announced the news on Musk’s social media site Twitter, posting a photo of herself hugging her new fiancé and announcing: “Very happy to share that after two years of dating, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and I we are engaged”.
Brodie-Sangster rose to fame at age 13 in the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually; He and Riley are reportedly already living together after buying a Grade II listed manor house in the countryside.
Musk wished them well on Twitter (which he recently renamed X), writing, “Congratulations!” with a red heart emoji.
Talulah Riley and Elon Musk at the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar Party on March 2, 2014
A very smart girl from Home Counties, Riley still hits it off with Musk, mostly, it seems, because she wholeheartedly agrees with his tenacious belief in free speech and his disdain for awakening. Last year she addressed the wide age range of her lovers. After Musk, now 52, after Rice, who is in her 60s, she now plans to marry someone who at 33, is not only four years younger than she is, but seems to have recently gravitated towards long pants. .
She said she has never seen age as particularly important, which she thinks is “probably an only child thing” – she grew up without siblings in Hertfordshire.
She met Brodie-Sangster while they were making Pistol, Danny Boyle’s 2022 FX TV drama about the Sex Pistols. Riley played punk designer Vivienne Westwood, who dressed the band, while he played Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ manager and Westwood’s partner.
“We hadn’t really recognized each other as a romantic possibility or potential until the moment we both did,” he told the Sunday Times in an interview last year. “And it was the same moment several months after we had worked together and been good friends.” When asked what changed, she replied: ‘Absolutely no idea. It was very strange.’
Often described by interviewers as refreshingly eccentric, she happily traded in the glamor of California’s super-rich after leaving Elon Musk for the quiet life in Hertfordshire. There, her hobbies include driving carriages and ringing the bells at the local church.
Riley grew up in Hemel Hempstead, where her father was a high-ranking police officer turned television writer and her mother founded a successful security company. He says that the happiest moments of his childhood were spent with the pony that his loving parents bought for him. She attended a number of smart private schools, such as Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Haberdashers’ Girls’ School, and she pursued her interest in acting by attending Saturday morning classes at London’s Sylvia Young Theater School.
Now Riley, 37, who rose to fame playing a schoolgirl in the St Trinian films, is engaged to baby-faced actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster.
She never intended to be an actress, she says, but pushed on when her career took off. In her late teens and early 20s, she began landing roles on television series such as Miss Marple, Poirot, and Dr Who before earning her breakout role as Mary Bennet in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley.
In the 2007 and 2009 St Trinian films, she had a starring role as the elegant schoolgirl Annabelle Fritton. It was in 2008, when she was a 22-year-old rising star, that she met Musk at London’s Whiskey Mist nightclub. The South African, then 37, had recently separated from Justine, his first wife and mother of his five young children.
He chatted with her about his passion for rockets and cars, and then she called her father to do an internet search to find out more about him. She would have learned, among other things, that he had already made nearly $176m (£120m) after his online payment platform, PayPal, was bought by eBay.
She described her husband-to-be at that first meeting as “very shy, very shy, quite clumsy, sweet” but also an “incredibly magnetic, wonderfully intelligent, funny and unusual man.” She also recalled that he asked if she could put her hand on her knee and she replied, ‘Okay, then continue.’ It was ‘very sweet that he asked’.
Riley, who was still a virgin when they met, agreed to have breakfast with him the next morning, and then they spent the next four days walking around London.
Talulah Riley and Thomas Brodie-Sangster attend Bulgari’s Gala Dinner to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and unveil the Jubilee Emerald Garden high jewelery set at Westminster Abbey on July 1, 2022
Their whirlwind romance continued when she flew to Los Angeles shortly after at his behest. They had only spent ten days together when Musk proposed to her and then gave her not one, but three engagement rings. They had a grand wedding at Dornoch Cathedral in the Scottish Highlands in 2010. When they settled in Los Angeles, their parents followed and lived there as well.
Riley put her acting career on hiatus while helping raise Musk’s progeny from her previous marriage: twins Griffin and Xavier, and triplets named Kai, Saxon, and Damian. However, she pined for England and cited deep homesickness for her as the reason for his first divorce from her in 2012. The separation didn’t last long, Riley saying they practically got back together at a divorce hearing, and married for second time. a year later in 2013.
A year later, Musk filed for divorce and later withdrew it. Two years later, it was she who applied after living apart for six months. Riley has said that she remembers her time with Musk with “incredible fondness.” Months after the second divorce, she insisted they were still “best friends,” telling the Mail: “We still see each other all the time and take care of each other.”
It seems clear that Musk was attracted to Riley for both her brains and her looks. She clearly knows her own mind. And it’s a mind that is in sync with Musk’s in many areas, particularly in their shared contempt for the politics of the awakening. In 2017, after allegedly surprising Cherie Blair in a £3m Georgian house in London’s Marylebone, Riley crossed swords with another prominent left-winger, Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, over her campaign for gender equality.
Elon Musk and Talulah Riley attend the launch party for high performance electric car brand Tesla Motors Ltd in Knightsbridge, London.
Angered by Watson’s ill-tempered praise of MTV for abolishing the “best actress” award at its annual awards ceremony and giving her a “best actor” gong instead, Riley told the Mail: “Men and women They should have the same rights, of course.” but (they) are also different and there is nothing wrong with that. We don’t have to start unifying gender to establish political equality.’
Musk deeply antagonized the left on both sides of the Atlantic by vowing to clamp down on Silicon Valley’s innate liberal bias when he bought Twitter for $44bn (£40bn) last year. However, he at least had his ex-wife on his side.
Court documents revealed private emails between the couple in which Riley urged him to “buy Twitter and then take it down please!?”, or “make it radically free of speech.” She said the platform “is being used by radicals for large-scale social engineering,” adding: “Please do something to fight the awakening.” I’ll do anything to help!
Her long on-off romance with artist and writer Matthew Rice was first reported in 2021, but only months later she was photographed holding hands with Brodie-Sangster.
It’s unclear if her fiancé shares Riley’s outspoken political views, but there is one area where they may be a great fit: She’s a lifelong teetotaler while, with her baby face, she still has trouble getting served. alcohol in bars.
