In addition to disguising his British accent to star in Prime Video’s “Daisy Jones & the Six,” Sam Claflin had to overcome singing like he was “on Broadway” to fully embody rocker Billy Dunne in the adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling book.
The show simultaneously follows Daisy Jones’ music pursuits while Billy Dunne takes over the band that his brother Graham (Will Harrison) started with childhood friends Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), later recruiting keyboardist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse) and creatively supported by Billy’s girlfriend Camila (Camila Morrone). Daisy gets a head start witnessing the growing LA rock scene on the Sunset strip, and The Six (formerly the Dunne Brothers) move to California from Pittsburgh when they decide to get serious.
“I read the book after I’d read the first couple of episodes and that was my introduction, not only into this story,” but to 1970s Los Angeles, Claflin told TheWrap. “I knew very little about the world that we were depicting honestly.”
Dunne gets a run for his money as the lead singer of The Six when their music producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright), invites Keough’s Daisy, inspired in part by Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, to feature on one of their songs “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb).” Their colliding egos make for great creative chemistry.
Claflin had to actively work on tweaking his vocals to sound like the frontman Dunne brother and less like a Broadway star.
“We had a long way to come. Neither of us really had any musical experience prior to this. I’ve done a bit of musical theater, but that actually was a hindrance, because when I started singing on this record, they were like, can you stop sounding like you’re on Broadway?” Claflin continued.
“I had so much vibrato for everything and they’re like, ‘no, no, no,’ you’re a rockstar in the ’70s. We had vocal coaches and the most incredible support network of musically talented and gifted people around us. Yeah, so I don’t think I could have done it without them, basically.”
Even as Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Keough shared that she still faced challenges in finding and maintaining her singing voice.
“Anywhere from songs being hard to learn to my fingers hurting from playing all day [there were] these little things that I hadn’t experienced before,” Keough told TheWrap. “Sometimes you would regress because you hadn’t worked on a song and then you have to start over and just, it was constantly something was wrong, but it was also a great challenge, and I feel proud of the whole band. Everybody really started somewhere and really ended up in a much more impressive place.”
The first three episodes of “Daisy Jones & the Six are now streaming on Prime Video.
