After Slow-Burn Rise, Riley Green Is Red Hot: ‘If This Had Happened To Me When I Was 22, It Would Have Been Mayhem’
“It was a perfect storm of him being completely on his A game with his writing, his artistry and his looks, and having this pop culture moment with Ella,” says his longtime friend Carly Pearce, whose own alluring duet with Green, “If I Don’t Leave, I’m Gonna Stay,” is out now. “People were wrapped up in ‘Are they together? Are they not?’ He was just ready.”
With songs that embraced rural culture like “I Wish Grandpas Never Died” and “Different ’Round Here,” “he’d built a really solid fan base who loved what he did,” says Jessi Vaughn Stevenson, a consultant at Green’s publisher, Warner Chappell Music Nashville, who has worked with Green for years. “And then you have a moment with a song like ‘You Look Like You Love Me,’ and then ‘Don’t Mind If I Do’ and [top 10 Country Airplay hit] ‘Change My Mind.’ He had the foundation laid, and so when a little fire started to ignite, it exploded because everything was covered in kerosene already.”
For Green, 37, this “moment” was a long time coming. He spent years in his hometown of Jacksonville, Ala., playing night gigs at a Mexican restaurant for $150 a week while working construction during the day. After building a solid following throughout the Southeast and self-releasing two EPs, he inked a publishing deal with Warner Chappell in 2017 and signed with Scott Borchetta and Jimmy Harnen’s Nashville Harbor Records & Entertainment the following year
“The only thing I feel anxious about in my career is that I want to take every opportunity I’ve been given to get as much out of it as I can,” he says today, seated at a picnic table at a private ranch in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, following his Billboard photo shoot in late April, as a trio of horses saunter behind him. Even after winning three trophies at the 2025 Country Music Association Awards and music event of the year at the 2026 Academy of Country Music Awards, “there’s no sense of ‘I can relax now.’ I’ve never felt that. It always feels like, ‘OK, this next album has got to be bigger than the last one.’ ”
His role model, he says, is Tim McGraw, another male country star who credibly segued on-screen after years in music. “When I saw him in [Yellowstone prequel] 1883 and how good he was in that, I was curious about how he went about mentally preparing for acting,” Green explains. At an event, McGraw, who has starred in movies like The Blind Side and Friday Night Lights, talked to Green about some of his own film choices and working on his craft. “I’d always thought acting was something you were born able to do,” Green says, “so when I heard him say it was something that you can work at and learn, then I thought maybe I had a chance to do it. It gave me a little bit of confidence that I should try it.”
Though Green exudes an unhurried calm in person, underneath his laid-back exterior lies an intense drive. “I don’t think that’s a negative thing. I was like that in sports,” explains Green, who played quarterback at Jacksonville State University. “When you won a football game, you didn’t live on that too long. You were worried about the next one. That’s just my competitive nature; I’ve always kind of been that way. I think that to a certain extent, that’s a healthy way to be.”
Already, he has his eye on expanding into acting. This spring, Green appeared in his first major role, a four-episode arc playing a former Navy SEAL with debilitating PTSD on CBS’ Yellowstone spinoff, Marshals. (His friend and the show’s co-star, actor-singer Luke Grimes, suggested him for the role, but Green still had to audition.) In one of his first scenes, his character experiences night terrors, an extremely emotionally complex scene for a new actor. “My nerves, as far as not having acted before, really didn’t come in until I thought about how serious that part is, to play somebody that’s been through something in a war setting,” Green says. “You want to do that justice. It’s not like just playing a cowboy. There were a couple of Navy SEALs on set that we had at our disposal to ask questions. I did a lot of that.”
