Since Taylor Jenkins Reid’s historical fiction novel Daisy Jones & The Six hit bookshelves in 2019, it’s been a runaway hit. It quickly landed on the New York Times Bestseller list, was picked for the Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club, and readers everywhere were adding it to their to-read piles. If you haven’t already read the novel, you’ve at least heard about it and its larger-than-life look at the rise and fall of a fictional 1970s rock band.
Daisy Jones fans everywhere will be pleased (and maybe skeptical) to learn that the book is being made into a limited miniseries by Amazon Studios for Prime Video. The teaser trailer just dropped–which you can check out at the end of this article–so here’s everything we know about the show so far:
It stars Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, and more.
Daisy Jones & The Six is all about a gritty-turned-famous ’70s rock band, so casting was paramount. Judging by the trailer, they made the right call. For the lead, they got Riley Keough to play enigmatic lead singer Daisy Jones. You might recognize Keough as Capable from Mad Max: Fury Road or Kim from It Comes at Night.
Starring opposite Keough is Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne, leader of The Six. You might recognize him as Will from Me Before You or Finnick Odair from Hunger Games: Catching Fire. As you can see, he’s no stranger to starring in movies based on books.
Other cast members include Sebastian Chacone, Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse, and Timothy Olyphant.
Keough is singing the songs herself.
At the heart of it, this show is about the music. You can’t have a good fictional band without good fictional music. It’s the songs that stick with us, which is why Josie and the Pussycats (2001) and That Thing You Do (1996) rocked so hard.
While the show could have hired a professional singer that Riley Keough could just lip-synch along to, they decided to have Keough do the vocals herself. She told Vanity Fair:
“I was like, I have to do it. I’m gonna go to this vocal coach, and he’s gonna teach me how to fucking belt, whatever I need to do to get this. It really became about pushing myself to do things I’ve never done before. At the end of the day, it’s not like I’m the best singer in the world. You know? Like, we’re not phenomenal singers. But we were proud of how far we got.”
A lot of the leeway given to Keough and her singing is thanks to her famous family. She’s the granddaughter of the late Elvis Presley. And considering rock bands from the ’70s were more known for their grit and charisma than their amazing vocals, this likely wasn’t a bad choice.
It’s being produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine.
Reese Witherspoon has become a big name in the literature world. She puts her sticker of approval on a book cover and it gets a massive boost in sales. She did it for Daisy Jones & The Six when the book came out in 2019, and now she has her production company, Hello Sunshine, involved in the show as well. Hello Sunshine (sometimes as their original name, Pacific Standard) has produced book-to-screen bangers like Gone Girl (2014), Big Little Lies (2017-2019), and Where the Crawdads Sing (2022). It looks like this adaptation is in capable hands.
The story is told using a documentary format.
So how do you get the sordid story of a ’70s rock band from a book to a miniseries? It’s being told in the format of a faux documentary with members of the band talking about what happened in the past, with cutaways to those times. It’d be interesting to see a play on an unreliable narrator if the interviewee says one thing, but the flashback says another. We’ll have to wait and see.
The first episodes come out soon.
The first three episodes are set to drop March 3, 2023 with three more to follow on March 10 until it reaches a conclusion at episode 10. If you want to catch this limited series, keep your eyes on Prime Video.
Check out the teaser trailer for a sneak peek.
Want to get even more pumped for the show? Watch the teaser trailer below.
