Riley Keough has named Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin as some of her reference points for her portrayal of the title character in Amazon Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & the Six.
Keough explained that she looked to men for inspiration for Daisy Jones because she felt the show’s protagonist was “ahead of her time” for a frontwoman in a band in the 1970s.
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to look exclusively at women; I want to look at Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. I drew influence from men because I thought Daisy was ahead of her time, in that she How open and how willing she was to go into space and be confident. I think it was really hard for women to do that,” she told Porter.
“I watched a lot of videos of [singers] from that era to get a sense of their antics. There was no longer freedom for women, and this was evident from their behavior on stage. It was much more restrictive in the 1970s, so I had to deal with it because my body movements are naturally typical of my generation.”
Keough also discussed the way in which she wanted to portray Daisy’s substance abuse. “Because it’s something I’ve experienced in my own family,” she explained, “I wanted those moments in which you don’t feel glamorous to Daisy’s addiction; to make sure those moments had weight; That we are seeing behind closed doors the humanity that people mistake for glamour.”
The actress also revealed that the adaptation of Taylor Jenkins-Reid’s bestselling book was to be filmed in 2020 but was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keough recalled, “We ended up having a year to practice and learn our instruments, and we became a pretty legit band.” “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we’re playing live and we know what we’re doing’. We didn’t have to pretend to believe in ourselves – it was authentic. In rehearsal, A month or two of rehearsals [as originally planned] would have done nothing for us. It would have been too pretentious.”
Some fans of the show noticed an Easter egg in the show’s second episode referring to Keough’s grandfather, Elvis Presley.
