When you watch Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & the Six, it’s easy to get whisked away into the world of 1970s rock and roll, and a huge part of that is that the actors cast to play the titular band actually came together as a band, learning every song and playing them all live. “I think after we’d essentially been rehearsing for like a year, after our last stint in band rehearsal, we all kind of got to a point where we were going, ‘You know, I think we got there,’” star Riley Keough tells Consequence with a laugh.
The series, based on the book by Taylor Jenkins Reid, focuses on the rise and fall of the titular fictional band: Keough as Daisy Jones (lead vocals), Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne (lead vocals, guitar), Suki Waterhouse as Karen Sirko (keyboards), Will Harrison as Graham Dunne (guitar), Josh Whitehouse as Eddie Roundtree (bass), and Sebastian Chacon as Warren Rojas (drums).
Claflin says that during “the first cast dinner that we organized ourselves, there was that moment where you meet the other people you were about to be working with for the next two years or whatever, and there was just a genuine ease to everyone. And I think that in that moment I was, ‘Okay, we’re doing something quite special here.’ Like whoever cast this is a genius, is what I’m trying to say — pulling these different personalities from different walks of life, from different sides of the planet, bringing us all together and finding that not one of us has an ego and not one of us felt better or more slighted than anyone else. I think we all just were very supportive and excited to be here.”
Daisy Jones & the Six, the band, has only one full album to their name, featuring songs created by Blake Mills, with production support from Tony Berg and contributions by Marcus Mumford, Phoebe Bridgers, and Jackson Browne. Titled Aurora, the album is now available for streaming and purchase, and the cast plays on every single track.
Keough says “I had never played guitar, never sang, never recorded an album. So the whole thing was new to me,” but every cast member who came to Daisy Jones came as a relative novice in their respective instruments.
“We all started very on a very rudimentary level,” says Waterhouse. “Even those of us that do play music, the idea of learning 12 songs and being able to play them note-perfect to be filmed… They wanted to film it in a very roaming way that meant that you never knew when you were gonna be on camera. So we all started at the beginning.”