Riley Keough took inspiration from Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin to play Daisy Jones

Riley Keough has named Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin as some of her reference points for her characterisation of the title character in Amazon Prime Video’s Daisy Jones And The Six. 

Keough explained that she looked at men for inspiration for Daisy Jones as she felt like 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 exclusively look at women; I want to look at Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix’. I pulled influence from men because I felt like Daisy was ahead of her time, in terms of how open and how willing she was to go into a space and be confident. I think that was really hard for women to do,” she told Porter.

“I watched so many videos of [singers] in that era to get a sense of their movements. There wasn’t the freedom there is now for women, and that is evident in how they behaved on stage. It was much more restricted in the 1970s, so I struggled with that because my body movements are so inherently of my generation.”

Keough also discussed the manner in which she wanted to portray Daisy’s substance abuse. “Because this is something I’ve experienced in my family,” she explained, “I wanted the moments in which you see Daisy’s addiction to not feel glamorous; to make sure that those moments had weight to them; that we’re seeing the humanity behind the closed doors of what people are perceiving to be glamour.”

The actress also revealed that the adaptation of Taylor Jenkins-Reid’s bestselling book was meant to be filmed in 2020, but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We ended up having a year to rehearse and learn our instruments, and we became a pretty legit band [over Zoom],” recalled Keough. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we’re playing live and we know what we’re doing’. We didn’t have to fake the confidence in ourselves – it was authentic. In hindsight, a month or two of rehearsal [as originally planned] would have done nothing for us. It would have been a lot of pretending.”

Some fans of the show noticed an Easter egg in the second episode of the show referencing Keough’s grandfather, Elvis Presley.