Talulah Riley: ‘Elon Musk is the perfect ex-husband’

I mean, there’s some pretty graphic stuff in there – like castration. I don’t know if would be good for TV. It basically turns into torture porn at the end,” laughs Talulah Riley. She is discussing her new book The Quickening about a terrifying dystopian matriarchy where “the future is fully female” as the tagline reads, and in which men are second-class citizens – many are forcibly turned into eunuchs in grotesque scenes. London looks very different – for example, St Paul’s Cathedral is now an all-female spa where women can “free bleed” on their period and its dome has a golden teat like a “beautiful blond breast”.

Men are tortured, castrated and kept like trophy wives in marital homes. It’s as dark and gripping as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – and, in my opinion, a no-brainer for a TV series. She’s also starring as Vivienne Westwood in Danny Boyle’s Pistol, the new FX TV drama charting the rise of the Sex Pistols on Disney+ – the fashion designer gave Riley her blessing to play her, and is, most famously, Elon Musk’s ex-wife. They married and divorced twice – first in 2010 to 2012 and then in 2013 to 2016.

“Obviously I understand it looks strange. But that logic made sense at the time,” says Riley, 36, sitting curled up on a chair looking refreshingly unglamorous in an old white fluffy jumper while explaining her on-off, on-off relationship with the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX boss–who is in the process of buying Twitter for $44bn.

“I suppose the reason to get remarried was just because it felt silly to be together unmarried after having been married. You know, it’s like a habit. We were saying ‘this is my husband.’ ‘This is my wife.’ ‘Oh, wait, no, we’re not that anymore. We better be that again.’ You know, it felt silly to go back to ‘this is my boyfriend’ when we’ve been married. So, we just got married again.”

It might sound like a conversation better suited for two school kids in the playground making up as best friends, rather than about marriage vows, but Riley isn’t superficial. The pair still share a “very deep love and connection”, she says. In the book’s acknowledgements she thanks Musk for being “the perfect ex-husband”. “He’s a great friend. He looks out for me. We are in a happy place now, where we’re good to each other, which is really nice. I have here utmost love for him,” she tells me.

The UK-born Riley, who rose to fame in 2005’s St Trinian’s and Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice in 2007, before playing sexbot Angela in Westworld in 2016, is talking to me via zoom from a shabby chic hotel room in Canterbury where she is performing in Dr Faustus at the Malthouse for two nights alongside Dominic West. She once happily gave up her career to care for Musk’s five children in a Bel Air mansion from his first marriage to Justine Musk. The brood included Musk’s transgender 18-year-old daughter, who has filed a petition to take her mother’s maiden name, so that her name becomes Vivian Jenna Wilson – and dramatically has cut all ties with her father.

“It wasn’t really a traditional housewife role. I mean, there were the rockets and the cars, and there were things blowing up… there was a lot going on – a lot that was very stimulating,” says Riley. ”We [her, and Musk’s kids] were very involved in what was going on. It was a group effort. A family-wide effort,” she says. “Elon was great. He had me alongside for all of that. So it wasn’t like I was stuck in a mansion in Bel Air like a trophy wife, which would not have been fun. I did, of course, witness that for others. But luckily, that was not my fate.”

Riley is now far happier living back in her hometown Hertfordshire with three ducks, her cocker spaniel Squigs, and her boyfriend Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren, Westwood’s former partner and the band’s manager in Pistol and who played Sam, Liam Neeson’s young stepson in Love Actually in 2003.

“I’m very into – you know, sustainable living and growing everything,” Riley says, looking naturally beautiful with long blond hair revealing dark roots like a balayage effect.

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“I’m not suited to LA lifestyle. I like ringing bells and growing vegetables and riding ponies in the countryside… LA’s just a sort of very different way of life. Which is not for me. But having said that, I’m very grateful for the experience of it. I just didn’t want to live out my whole life there.”

Talking of Hollywood, I ask her what she thought about the explosive Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial – of course, Heard was also once romantically linked to Musk. “I saw bits that cropped up on BBC News, but I didn’t watch it,” she tells me. Is the verdict a backwards step for the MeToo movement?

“I wouldn’t say so. It seemed like something intensely personal that was playing out in a public sphere that looked like a private matter, really.”

She adds: “Gosh, I hope everyone can just kind of be okay and crack on.”

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The Quickening is Riley’s second novel. Her bold debut Acts of Love in 2016 – a love story about an English journalist and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur – was a “refreshing love story about the importance of independence and destiny” according to Marie Claire. She brushed off any parallels to her own life with Musk. Likewise, she makes it clear that her latest novel isn’t about hating men.

“I love men… I’m not advocating it [the philosophy in her book],” she says as if it’s the most preposterous idea. “I suppose the whole point of my book is that any extremist ideology is a bad one.”

Riley’s fictional dark dystopian matriarchy is run by the visionary Dana Mayer – a beautiful and ethereal figure – where women are in total control.

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The world runs at a different pace since “the crazy speed of pre-Change London” when in 2022 there was a global recession. Men are imprisoned in a system in which they fall into three categories. Gentlemen – are a “significant societal minority” of functioning heterosexual men like “trophy wives or pampered house pets” in their marital homes; Eunuchs who have more freedoms at the cost of being sexually tamed; and men in the Infrastructure Towns: cisgender heterosexual men living and working together, who are separated from the rest of society – but who can smoke cigarettes and play football. That’s a big bonus in this regime.

Men in Riley’s fictional world must pay reparations for their past crimes. The story is co-narrated by Victoria – a former “tacky mega star” turned “terrifying political minister” of the regime – whose pre-regime boyfriend “smacked her around” – and Arthur, who fell in love with Dana at Oxford University when The Quickening manifesto was just an idea.

Now, he’s been palmed off as husband to one of her friends, living as a “gentleman” in a luxury padded room with domestic staff who carry electroshock guns to keep control. Gentlemen walk around in bowler hats and silk ties – but only clip-on ones so they can’t try and escape their existence.

It’s The Handmaid’s Tale take two, but instead of Aunt Lydia, we have Laura Montague-Smith, Dana’s best friend from her university days, now the fearsome Secretary of Defence torturing men with no remorse.

She’s the one offering men in The Nest – a reconditioning unit where men are tortured – manual castration or worse, The Pill, which turns men into zombies.

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It’s here that Arthur is humiliated: “My arms were manacled to long chains that stretched to a track running the perimeter of the ceiling, and I was forced to walk in endless circles wearing ridiculous high-heeled shoes until my feet bled.” He watches a man get castrated – before learning his fate.

“Obviously, violence against women is perpetrated on-screen continuously,” says Riley. “How many times have you seen someone being raped in a film? … So, I thought that the kind of cathartic equivalent of that visually would be castration of the male. And so that’s, that’s where it ends up.”

Her fictional dystopia is chilling, but how does she see the future of the real world?

“I try and stay optimistic about the future because you have to be... it’s a zero-sum game when you’re looking at humanity and existential threats. It’s either, we survive, or we don’t,” she says. And if we don’t? Would she hitch a ride on Musk’s space rocket to Mars?

“I’m happy to go down with a sinking ship in that sense if you’re talking about Earth being destroyed,” she says without hesitation. “But hopefully that’s not going to be anytime soon. I mean, if we’re sensible, we should have quite a bit more time as a species.”

‘The Quickening’ is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £20. ‘Pistol’ is on Disney+ now