How the Daisy Jones & the Six Cast Became Rockstars: "Art Imitated Life"
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In the fourth episode of Daisy Jones & the Six, the titular band takes the stage together for the first time.
The Six, led by Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), is playing at the Diamond Head Festival in Oahu, Hawaii, a setting inspired by the real Diamond Head Crater festivals in the '70s, which were the island's equivalent of Woodstock.
Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) is set to join them for the fourth song, to play their brand-new collaboration "Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)," but overeager and impatient to be performing, she comes on stage after the first song. Daisy then stays for the rest of the Six's set, playing tambourine and providing back-up vocals. The whole 9-minute segment is the first moment in the show where the audience thinks, okay, this is a real band.
"That was our first big performance on the show," Sebastian Chacon, who plays drummer Warren Rojas, tells Town & Country of the Hawaii festival scene. Before they filmed the concert, they shot footage of the band is walking up to the stage, and all the extras fake-partying in the crowd made it feel real, he says. In the episode, the band performs three full songs back-to-back in the episode, marking the first major concert set piece in the TV series.
Chacon, along with other band members Josh Whitehouse, who plays Eddie, and Will Harrison, who plays Graham, all had a musical background before they were cast on the show, but they were not professional musicians. Because of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, however, shooting on Prime Video's Daisy Jones & the Six was delayed for over a year and a half. For the actors playing the musicians in the band, this delay was a blessing in disguise.
"We had three months, then the pandemic, and then another three months again as like a refresher—by which point we all knew our parts, we knew the songs, and we'd really come together by then. We were practicing every day," Whitehouse recalls to T&C. "You put that kind of work in and it really all just starts to become so natural, which really helps for the screen."
Not everyone had three months of rehearsal, however. "I was gonna have one month of rehearsal, and then get straight into shooting," Chacon says. "But then we pushed a year and a half, so we had a lot of time to not only learn the parts, but become really comfortable—and develop opinions and make little adjustments." For example, Chacon realized when he plays drums, he likes to press his lips together. But, reflecting on his carefree, party hard character, he thought, "Warren would be like chewing it up and making weird faces." So he leaned into that. Those little details, he said, "start to come into play when you work for that long."
The actors all took part in a band camp, which helped them find their comfort with the instruments and singing, working with musical director Ryan Hommel (who also served as a guitar and bass coach). Hommel wrote on his Instagram that "all of these people became family and it felt like actually prepping for a tour." He added, "These actors showed up and strived for greatness everyday and they truly learned how to play their instruments by way of this amazing repertoire and the distinct musical personalities that Blake [Mills] worked so hard to create and cultivate for each character. And they all took music seriously as a craft and made a place for it within their primary craft as actors."
In fact, Whitehouse had been a musician from a young age—he took up guitar at 11 and had played in various bands. But his character Eddie plays the bass guitar, an instrument he wasn't as familiar with. "Bass wasn't my instrument," he says with a laugh. "I thought it was at one point. I was like, 'Oh, I can play bass!' but this job taught me that I couldn't— and then it taught me that I could."
For Harrison, who had played guitar since he was 10 years old, the COVID break afforded him the time to train and improve his technique, and, as he puts it, "actually get better" to portray guitarist Graham Dunne. He says, "We had so much time to work on this in the end that we didn't think we'd have, which was just such a bonus. I think that there's something that most musicians would agree with, which is that when you take time away from something you've learned, drop it and just leave it and then return to it, you're gonna come back with such a wider base of knowledge and more confidence when you're getting back into that thing."
Their confidence shows in episode four when they take the stage. "Had we filmed this on time, I think there would have been a lot more movie magic required," co-creator Scott Neustadter tells T&C. "By the time we did roll cameras, these guys were actual musicians. It was unbelievable to see; that's what you're watching—you're not watching a lot of fakery."
The process for filming the festival was not as loose and free-flowing as it may appear on screen. When the cameras were rolling, the actors played along to the tracks recorded at Sound City by Blake Mills, the show's lead producer and songwriter, and Tony Berg, the chief music consultant on Daisy and co-producer. Before the scene, the actors received time-stamped playback of what they would be playing along to, Whitehouse explains, "to make sure that right before we had time to really rehearse that and just listen to it absorb it and fully." Since the Six performs so many different iterations of the same songs throughout the run of the show—snippets of performances, live versions, studio versions—the actors wanted to make sure they knew exactly which version was being queued up for the scene.
So while the studio tracks served as backing tracks, the band's instruments were also miked and plugged in during the filming, and the actors had a bit of room to experiment. For Chacon on the drums, in the earlier songs, he was playing along pretty rigidly. But, he says, as filming went on, "it got a little looser and they were recording what I was doing a little more."
"They were always taking a feed of what we were doing in case there was something that like they wanted to keep, or mix into the track," Whitehouse says. "It was a hybrid of live performance and the backing track in the end."
Daisy Jones & The Six: A Novel
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For author Taylor Jenkins Reid, to see her fictional characters come to such vivid life off the page has been nothing short of remarkable for her. "There were times throughout the course of the project and filming where I said to [the actors], 'You're a rockstar!' And they were all like, 'no, no,' but now it's like undeniable," she tells T&C. "I will not allow them to refute me anymore. It's evidence, everyone can see it. It's a fact."
Daisy Jones & the Six was largely shot chronologically, which helped the actors get more comfortable in the concert scenes as time went on. "Going through mostly chronologically through both the band's rise and these concerts that they were playing getting bigger and bigger was an awesome benefit," Harrison tells T&C of the filming schedule. "We were able to kind of just ride that wave throughout shooting the show."
"We're supposed to be a bit wobbly in the beginning anyway, because we're sort of coming into our own," Whitehouse adds. "It was like art was imitating life. As we were developing in the storyline, we as actors in the roles were also becoming more comfortable—it was quite organic."
As the profile of the band rises throughout the ten episodes, their fame eventually culminates in them playing massive stadium concerts. "In a funny way we felt prepared," Harrison says, speaking about those final performances. "It was obviously very condensed, and it's a TV show, but we had done the club scene, we had done those smaller festivals and we were building our way up to these huge concerts. It was so much fun."
Episodes 1 through 6 of Daisy Jones & the Six are now streaming on Prime Video. Shop Now
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