Nobody 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 world’s richest men.
Then, having left 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, who is 23 years her senior and is the ex-husband of pottery queen Emma Bridgewater.
Now 37-year-old Riley, who rose to acting fame playing a schoolgirl in St Trinian’s films, is engaged to 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦-faced actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster. The British actress fittingly announced the news on Musk’s social media site Twitter, posting a picture of her cuddling her new fiance and announcing: ‘Very happy to share that after two years of dating, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and I are engaged!’
Brodie-Sangster shot to fame at 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 highly intelligent girl from the Home Counties, Riley still gets on well with Musk, not least, it appears, because she agrees wholeheartedly with his tenacious belief in free speech and disdain for wokery. Last year she addressed the wide age-range of her lovers. After Musk, now 52, then Rice, who is around 60, she is now planning to marry someone who at 33, is not only four years younger than her but looks like he only recently gravitated to long trousers.
She said she has never seen age as particularly important, which she believes is ‘probably an only-𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥 thing’ — she was raised without siblings in Hertfordshire.
She met Brodie-Sangster while they were making Danny Boyle’s 2022 FX TV drama Pistol, 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 acknowledged each other as a romantic possibility or potential until the moment that we both did,’ she told the Sunday Times in an interview last year. ‘And it was the same moment a number of months after having worked together and been good friends.’ Asked what changed, she replied: ‘Absolutely no idea. It was very strange.’
Often described by interviewers as refreshingly eccentric, she happily swapped the private-jet-setting, lavish party-throwing glamour of the California uber-rich after leaving Elon Musk for the quiet life back in Hertfordshire. There, her hobbies include carriage-driving and bell-ringing at the local church.
Riley grew up in Hemel Hempstead where her father was a senior policeman-turned-TV-scriptwriter and her mother started a successful security firm. She says her happiest 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood moments were spent with the pony her doting parents bought her. She went to a string of smart private schools including Cheltenham Ladies’ College and the Haberdashers’ Girls’ School, and pursued her interest in acting by going to Saturday morning classes at London’s Sylvia Young Theatre School.
Now 37-year-old Riley, who rose to acting fame playing a schoolgirl in St Trinian’s films, is engaged to 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦-faced actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster
She never intended to be an actress, she says, but ran with it when her career took off. In her late teens and early 20s, she began getting parts in TV series such as Miss Marple, Poirot and Dr Who before she won her break-out role playing Mary Bennet in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride And Prejudice starring Keira Knightley.
In the 2007 and 2009 St Trinian’s films, she had a starring role as posh schoolgirl Annabelle Fritton. It was in 2008, when she was a 22-year-old rising star that she met Musk in London nightclub Whisky Mist. The South African, then 37, had recently separated from Justine, his first wife and mother of his five young sons.
He chatted her up by talking to her about his passion for rockets and cars, and she later rang 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 $176 million (£120 million) after his online payment platform, PayPal, was bought by eBay.
She described her future husband at that first meeting as ‘very diffident, very shy, quite awkward, sweet’ but also as an ‘incredibly magnetic, wonderfully smart, funny, unusual man’. She also recalled him asking if he could put his hand on her knee and her replying, ‘OK, go on then.’ It was ‘quite sweet that he asked’.
Riley, who was still a virgin when they met, agreed to join him for breakfast the following morning and they then spent the next four days walking around London.
Talulah Riley and Thomas Brodie-Sangster attend the Bulgari gala dinner to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and unveil the Jubilee Emerald Garden high jewellery set at Westminster Abbey on July 1, 2022
Their whirlwind romance continued when she flew soon afterwards to Los Angeles at his behest. They had spent just ten days together when Musk proposed, later giving her not one but three engagement rings. They had a big wedding in Dornoch Cathedral in the Scottish Highlands in 2010. When they settled in LA, her parents followed and lived there too.
Riley put her acting career on pause as she helped bring up the Musk brood from his previous marriage — twins Griffin and Xavier, and triplets named Kai, Saxon and Damian. However, she pined for England and has cited her deep homesickness as the reason for their first divorce in 2012. The separation didn’t last long — Riley has said they pretty much got back together at a divorce hearing — and they married a second time a year later in 2013.
A year later Musk filed for divorce, then withdrew it. Two years later, she was the one who filed after they had lived apart for six months. Riley has said she looks back on her time with Musk with ‘incredible fondness’. Months after the second divorce, she insisted they remained ‘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 her brains as much as her looks. She clearly knows her own mind. And it’s a mind that syncs with Musk’s on many areas — particularly in their shared contempt for woke politics. In 2017, after reportedly gazumping Cherie Blair on a £3 million Georgian house in London’s Marylebone, Riley crossed swords with another prominent female Left-winger, Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, over her gender equality campaigning.
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 po-faced praise for MTV for abolishing the ‘best actress’ prize at its annual awards ceremony and giving her a ‘best actor’ gong instead, Riley told the Mail: ‘Men and women should have equal rights, of course, but [they] are also different and there’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t have to start unifying gender in order to establish political equality.’
Musk deeply antagonised 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 $44 billion (£40billion) last year. However, he at least had his ex-wife in his corner.
Court documents revealed private emails between the pair in which Riley urged him to ‘buy Twitter and then delete it, please!?’, or else ‘make it radically free speech’. She said the platform ‘is being used by radicals for social engineering on a massive scale’, adding: ‘Please do something to fight wokeism. I will do anything to help!’
Her lengthy on-off romance with artist and writer Matthew Rice was first reported in 2021 but just months later she was photographed holding hands with Brodie-Sangster.
It’s unclear whether her fiance shares Riley’s forthright political views but there’s one area where they may fit together nicely — she is a lifelong teetotaller while, with his 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦 face, he still has trouble getting served alcohol in bars.
