Daisy Jones & The Six Stars Riley Keough and Sam Claflin on Making the Band

Daisy Jones & The Six Stars Riley Keough and Sam Claflin on Making the Band

(Photo by Lacey Terrell/Prime Video)
Was the term “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” meant to suggest an order of preference?
In Daisy Jones The Six , Prime Video’s glossy miniseries adaptation of author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling novel, Riley Keough stars as Daisy Jones, the red-headed wild-child of the 1970s Sunset Strip. She has an ear for music and a mind for song-writing. But she also has a nose for drugs.
Daisy’s kinetic energy with Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), the lead singer and mastermind of rising folk-rock band The Six, would mean that there’s an obvious answer to a...

(Photo by Lacey Terrell/Prime Video)
Was the term “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” meant to suggest an order of preference?
In Daisy Jones The Six , Prime Video’s glossy miniseries adaptation of author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling novel, Riley Keough stars as Daisy Jones, the red-headed wild-child of the 1970s Sunset Strip. She has an ear for music and a mind for song-writing. But she also has a nose for drugs.
Daisy’s kinetic energy with Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), the lead singer and mastermind of rising folk-rock band The Six, would mean that there’s an obvious answer to a will-they-or-won’t-they when they partner on a new album — if it weren’t that Billy is married to photographer Camila (Camila Morrone). Told in a docu-style narrative, we learn early on that Daisy Jones The Six made the hit album Aurora — known for such bangers as “Regret Me,” “Kill You to Try,” and “Let Me Down Easy” — before they (seemingly) suddenly disband after a sold-out concert at Chicago’s Soldier Field.
Showrunner Will Graham said the idea is to make the experience feel relatable.
“It’s not ‘cool’; we’re not saying like look at these amazing rock stars,” he said. “We’re saying step in with these people and be part of the ride.” He added that, in capturing the spirit of the novel, the message of this dysfunctional family is that “it was complicated, but it was worth it. And look what we did and look what we made and people are still singing the songs.”
Director and executive producer James Ponsoldt equated it to “making a really big cinematic home movie about people making something together.”
But what did it take to get the band together? We asked the cast and producers. Daisy Billy (Photo by Lacey Terrell/Prime Video)
Keough told Rotten Tomatoes that the first time she felt a Daisy-Billy bond with Claflin was when he auditioned for the part. She’d already been cast and she remembered looking at him and “in that audition, I remember thinking ‘that’s Billy’ in the room.” In a very Daisy move, when Claflin momentarily forgot his lines, Keough said she shoved him out from behind a curtain “and was like, ‘You got this!'”
For Claflin, that moment didn’t come until the fifth episode. That’s when the characters are working together on the album’s titular song, “Aurora” away from the rest of the band, and he said that “not only were we getting to know the characters, and the relationship between the characters, but actually get to know each other as actors.”
Casting Keough seemed almost too much like a no-brainer. The actress is, famously, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter. But her appearance even resembles that of the fictional Daisy, who is described in the book as having thick and wavy copper-red hair and dark blue eyes.
“She had read the novel, and she said, ‘I need to play this part. I was born to play this part,’ and all we have to do is sit back and be like, ‘Great,'” executive producer and co-creator Scott Neustadter said. (Photo by Lacey Terrell/Prime Video)
The art-imitating-life-imitating-art situation will probably happen again thanks to work of costume designer Denise Wingate and her team. In the book, Daisy is a fashion It girl who is gifted Halston gowns at her Chateau Marmont bungalow and is known to accessorize with earrings and sleeves of bangle bracelets. A pivotal episode of this limited series features Keough looking carefree in vibrant caftans — one of many designs that will probably start fashion trends.
“I’ve always felt that everything in the ’70s was more beautiful: fashion, cars, architecture, music,” Keough said. “So it was really a dream to get to exist in that place and get to drive these cars and wear the clothes.”
Other characters’ costumes might not hold up as well. The book frequently mentions Billy’s penchant for a “Canadian tuxedo” of denim shirts pair...