See the ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ Characters vs. Their Real-Life Inspirations
Daisy Jones & The Six isn’t a real band, but try believing that after you see the rock ensemble hit high notes and low notes in the Prime Video series of the same name.
Based off the bestselling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reids, Daisy Jones & The Six details “the rise and precipitous fall” of a renowned (and fictional) rock band that hit the big time in the 1970s and then “imploded at the height of its powers,” as Amazon explains in a press release.
As Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, and the other cast members got ready to rock out on screen, they attended a months-long “band camp” with music supervisor Frankie Pine. “I wanted to really try to create a sense that this is a real band,” Pine told The New York Times. “When you’re a real band, you hang out together, you eat together, you drink together, you bitch to each other. You go through the normal motions of a group of people that are constantly together. So I was really trying to create this camaraderie that a true rock ’n’ roll band has.”
Some of the Daisy Jones actors also found inspiration in real-life stars of the music industry. Scroll down to see those cast members in character, alongside the real-life figures who influenced them.
Daisy Jones & The Six, Series Premiere, Friday, March 3, Prime Video
Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) vs. Stevie Nicks
In a Reese’s Book Club blog post, Jenkins Reid said that Fleetwood Mac — and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, in particular — gave her the spark for her novel. “When I decided I wanted to write a book about rock ’n’ roll, I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide’ [in the 1997 TV special Fleetwood Mac: The Dance]. How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.”
Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) vs. Bruce Springsteen
If Daisy Jones is an analog for Stevie Nicks, that would make Sam Claflin’s character Lindsey Buckingham. But the actor told Variety that Billy Dunne was “heavily influenced” by Bruce Springsteen. And Claflin had The Boss in mind when he belted out songs for the TV show. “I don’t know that I can sort of say I channeled him much on stage, but I did my best,” he explained to Today.
Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse) vs. Nickey Barclay
In an interview on the Kyle Meredith With… podcast, Suki Waterhouse said that she read interviews with the late Fleetwood Mac keyboardist Christine McVie after getting the part of keyboardist Karen Cirko on Daisy Jones. But she also drew inspiration from Nickey Barclay, a member of the all-female ’70s rock band Fanny. “There’s one interview that really kind of broke my heart that I’ve read over a lot of times,” she said. “I still read it to kind of connect to the character.”
Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon) vs. Jo Jones
In an interview with Wilson Morales of BlackFilmandTV.com, Sebastian Chacon said he looked to jazz drummer Jo Jones as he prepared to play drummer Warren Rojas on Daisy Jones. “Literally, I just stole my whole drum kit setup from him,” the actor said. “He would always be smiling and like relishing as he plays, and I thought that that would be music that Warren would have come up listening to, and I really wanted to inject it in as much as possible.”
Simone Jackson (Nabiyah Be) vs. Donna Summer
Nabiyah Be is a singer-songwriter in her own right, but for the character of Simone Jackson in Daisy Jones, she based her performance on disco-era legends. “I would say you definitely get an aura of Donna Summer through Simone and some early soul singers in her first steps, or when we first meet her in the series,” she revealed to Morales. “ If I was channeling Donna Summer, bless her spirit. I mean, Simone was really a big mixture of the big three, I would say: Donna, Diana Ross, Chaka [Khan].”
Camila Dunne (Camila Morrone) vs. Cher
Camila Morrone, meanwhile, told Morales she didn’t base her character, Camila Dunne, off one person in particular. Instead, she looked for an “essence” as she watched footage from Woodstock and documentaries about the Laurel Canyon music scene. “But I got a lot of inspiration from Ali McGraw and Cher,” she added. “The first few episodes, I’ve got this long, straight, black hair. That was an homage to Cher for me.”
Teddy Price (Tom Wright) vs. Quincy Jones
Actor Tom Wright modeled his character, Teddy Price, on real-life record producers Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, and Al Bell. The actor also told Today that his costars have real musical ability, as he found out when they performed for Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company. “I was blown away. I was knocked out. They looked, they sounded, and they felt like a real band,” he said. “And that’s when I knew I was gonna have to step my game up.”
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