While many people have unfulfilled dreams of being a rock star, the cast of the new TV adaptation of Daisy Jones And The Six were required to pull off being a world famous band in order to make the show.
It’s based on the best-selling novel from 2019 – which is itself thought to be inspired by the band Fleetwood Mac – and is about the trajectory of a group who become mega stars, and the romantic relationships of its members.
The bulk of the story happens in the 1970s, so it’s a period piece, but we also see the bandmates looking back on their rise to fame in a documentary set in the 1990s. Riley Keough plays the titular Daisy Jones, while Sam Claflin, Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse and Nabiyah Be are also among the stars.
For Hunger Games star Claflin, who plays one of the group’s lead singers Billy Dunne, it was the opportunity to play a father that was the most enjoyable aspect of filming.
“I genuinely loved being a dad,” he told Sky News’ Backstage podcast. “As an actual real-life dad it was nice to bring my experience into filmmaking for the first time.
“It was really, for me, refreshing playing a character who went through similar struggles that I’ve been through being a dad and trying to be an artist at the same time. So it was a real joy for me to experience the drama that surrounds his life, I suppose.”
Claflin says wanting to bring his own experiences to his performances is something relatively new for him.
“I think I spent the majority of my early years in my career desperately trying to get away from myself and trying to prove to people that I can do this and I can wear this hat and I can, you know, I can be angry and I can be sad. But I think as I’m getting older, I’m like, no, actually I really want to use my own experiences and be very authentic with my performance, and kind of tap into things that are relatable to me.”
During the series, viewers see how Daisy Jones meets The Six and their subsequent rise to stardom. As well as the intertwined relationships, it also explores fame and its trappings.
Claflin says being a celebrity in the 1970s was very different to being a star today.
“You’re seen everywhere – everything you say is immediately broadcast and tweeted and tik-toked and becomes a meme and a gif,” he said. “Or a jif – is it a gif or a jif?”
He continued: “I think it’s impossible to do anything without being seen now, I think there’s definitely with that positives, but there’s obviously huge negatives.
“I only speak for myself and I don’t know that I live out in the public eye enough to really warrant much interest in my private life, but I feel like I’m very fortunate that I get to live my life, my private life, very privately – I have my kids and live my life with my family and no one really knows what we look like.”
Morrone plays Billy Dunne’s wife, also called Camila. The actress was previously in a relationship with Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio, but says like Claflin she manages to avoid too much scrutiny.
“There was definitely a mystery around ’70s fame, I think today with social media and paparazzi there’s an accessibility around fame,” she said.
“I think it is kind of cool to have lived before the era of iPhones, where everything now that you do can be recorded, photographed – there was much more freedom back then to have conversations and be open and play around with ideas and thoughts and to party and, you know, kind of let loose.
“And now there’s always this tension of knowing that there’s this element that’s out of your control, so I can imagine that that would have been a really different experience to fame and beautiful in its own way – but yeah, I also, like Sam, live a very normal life, I wouldn’t say that it’s all encompassing in my life.”
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Morrone’s character isn’t in the band the show is named after, but is an integral part of the story. She says the thing she loved most about making the programme was the aesthetics.
“I’ve never gotten to play a character where costume was important, and for me this costume was very important because it kind of helped the way that I moved – I was barefoot a lot, and it kind of made me feel like Laurel Canyon, Earth-Mom, hippie,” she said.
“It was also fun to create that journey, where she starts off in Pittsburgh as a young teenage conservative girl who lives with her parents, and then she becomes the wife of the biggest rock star in the world; becoming a woman and discovering her sensuality, sexuality… she goes from like 17, 18, 19 to her late twenties and becomes the young woman that she’s going to be.”
Daisy Jones And The Six is streaming on Prime Video. Hear our review in the latest episode of Backstage – the film and TV podcast from Sky News