Riley Keough is embracing the industry that made her family famous in Daisy Jones & The Six. Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and granddaughter of Elvis Presley, stars as the titular lead singer in the long-awaited adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s hit novel. The first photos from the series were published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday, alongside a release date. The show will debut on Amazon’s Prime Video on March 3.
Daisey Jones & The Six tracks a fictional rock band’s rise and fall during the 1970s in Los Angeles. Reid’s novel was written in a unique format, presenting the band’s story as an oral history rather than a traditional prose novel. Executive producer Scott Neustadter and co-writer Michael H. Weber, whose credits include (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now, brought that format to life by having the characters look back on the past, but shrunk the timespan to 20 years. The actors play their characters in the 1970s and during the documentary-style footage set two decades after the band’s success.
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Aside from Keough, the cast includes Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne, a rock star torn between his art and the man who hopes to be for his wife Camila, played by Camila Morrone. Suki Waterhouse, Nabiyah Be, Will Harison, Josh Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon, Tom Wright, Timothy Olyphant, and Jacqueline Obradors also star.
The series was announced back in 2019, and production was set to start just before the COVID-19 pandemic began. “We had all just got to LA and we all had our first sort of get-together,” Claflin told Vanity Fair. We went out to dinner and then we all went home and disappeared for like a year and a half. It was quite frustrating.” The cast tried to keep in touch during the pandemic lockdowns, but they did not finally get to start filming in Los Angeles until June 2021.
When Keough heard about the project for the first time, she was not aware of the book. She did not even know if Daisy Jones & The Six were a real band. However, once she was told the show was about a band in the 1970s, she instantly realized she had to do it.
“All I knew is she goes, ‘It’s called Daisy Jones & the Six, and it’s about a band in the ’70s.’ And in my head, I was like, I know I’m playing Daisy. I just knew it,” Keough recalled. “I don’t even know if one script was written, I didn’t know if they liked me, I hadn’t even talked to them at that stage. The only other time I’ve experienced that is when I met my husband and I knew a week in that I’m gonna have kids with him and marry him.”
The biggest hurdle Keough faced though was playing the music. There is no dubbing in the show and all the cast members play their instruments. Although Keough is a music royal, she only had experience playing the piano as a child. Her first audition tape included her singing a Fleetwood Mac song softly, but that was not good enough. She eventually went to a vocal coach to learn how to belt out as a singer. After working with a vocal coach, Keough filmed a take of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” which won producers over.
During her struggles to sing, Keough recalled how her agent suggested she sing “Shallow” from A Star is Born to get herself in the mindset. She thought she sounded terrible, but this only gave her inspiration to push herself to get it right. “I was like, I can’t do it, and when I can’t do something it lights a fire in me to be able to do it,” she said. “I was like, I have to do it. I’m gonna go to this vocal coach, and he’s gonna teach me how to f—ing belt, whatever I need to do to get this. It really became about pushing myself to do things I’ve never done before.”
