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There’s something amusingly meta about watching Riley Keough watch a Fleetwood Mac performance. The real band’s influence on Daisy Jones & the Six, in which she stars as the titular Stevie Nicks–esque singer, has been well-documented. But Keough was surprised to learn that one of the group’s original members has, in fact, acknowledged her series.
The day before our Zoom call, Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham—whose Relationship with Nicks inspired the characters of Daisy and Billy Dunne (played by Sam Claflin)—posted a TikTok alluding to renewed chatter about their breakup. Buckingham posted a clip from a 1997 performance of “Silver Springs,” a searing kiss-off song Nicks wrote about Buckingham. “I heard we’re talking about that ’97 ‘Silver Springs’ again,” he wrote.
When I alert Keough to this all-important development, she immediately pulls the video up on her laptop. “I need to see this right now,” she says. “I’m wasting our interview because I need to see if this is fake news.” Keough watches the TikTok with delight, smiling in a dazed way before commenting beneath the video with three simple words: “Yes we are.”
The fact that Buckingham felt the need to give Daisy Jones a nod is proof of the show’s impressive reach. Based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel, the Prime Video series has hit number one on the streamer; its accompanying album, Aurora, featuring the cast singing fictional ’70s hits, peaked at number one in the US on iTunes. It’s undeniably the biggest role of Keough’s career thus far—and a moment that she’s referred to as “cosmic.” But stepping into a spotlight that she’s tried to shirk most of her life took a concerted effort, Keough tells me.
The 33-year-old actor is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley and the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley. By the time she reached high school, she had called both Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage stepfathers. “I grew up with a family that was very much in the public eye, and my childhood was really intense in that way, especially in the ’90s and early 2000s,” Keough says. “It was probably similar to what the Kardashian kids experience now—not being able to go out the front of buildings and having to sneak around and not being able to do…” She trails off. “Just a lot of attention, not being able to do normal things. I really started to appreciate normal things in life—being able to go to the coffee shop and sit there.”
As an adult, Keough has largely evaded the nepo-baby conversation (and dissection of her personal life) by acting in indie projects, including American Honey and Zola. (One of the glaring exceptions is 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, through which she met her Australian stuntman husband, Ben Smith-Petersen. The two now share a newborn daughter.) “I didn’t actively make choices that were obviously going to change my life,” she says. “I was always trying to navigate how I can perform and also have this thing that’s really special to me, which is being able to do normal things in the world. Subconsciously I was always operating this way, avoiding things that felt…I don’t know, that would change that for my life.”
Daisy, with its built-in fan base and tangential ties to her musical pedigree, seems like it would have totally derailed the plan. But in the last five years, Keough says, she gave herself freedom to say yes. “I did know that Daisy Jones was going to be a big show. I just stopped caring as much about the outcome,” she explains. “Ultimately, it was just something that in my soul I felt like I needed to do. I also felt like I wanted to do something that would bring joy to my life. I’ve been through a lot in life prior to Daisy, and I just wanted to be in a space at work that felt like fun and not heavy, and dark, and serious. And the environment of that show was all of those things.”
Embracing Daisy also meant learning to sing and play instruments, which the cast did via virtual band camp during a pandemic-induced delay. The fruits of Keough and the cast’s labor are on full display in the season finale, where Daisy Jones & the Six perform their final concert in Chicago. Wearing a vintage gold Halston cape, an homage to Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman,” Keough’s Daisy sings like she knows it’s the last time. These live performances were filmed over a week of overnight shoots in New Orleans, where Keough and her cohort would sing until the sun rose. “It was totally chaotic, but it was the moment we’d all been waiting for,” she says, adding, “There wasn’t a part of us that felt like we were actors anymore.”
LACEY TERRELL
Keough’s emotionally charged performance includes loads of heated glances at Claflin’s Billy. At one point in the finale, a newly relapsed Billy tells Daisy that they can “be broken together” because his wife, Camila (Camila Morrone), has left him. But after 10 episodes’ worth of self-destructive behavior, Daisy declares, “I don’t want to be broken”—a moment of agency not afforded to the character in Reid’s book.
“She just very simply doesn’t want this for herself anymore—especially not this way, not the way that he’s coming to her. It’s not that version of Billy that she’s in love with. She’s in love with all of Billy, but she’s mostly been around him sober,” Keough explains. “So seeing that this is what she’s bringing out of him doesn’t feel good to her. It’s a moment of power for her to go, I’m going to walk away from this.”
Daisy’s substance abuse, which Keough has said she approached with particular sensitivity “because this is something I’ve experienced in my family,” is exacerbated by both her untenable dynamic with Billy and the crippling lack of love she’s received from her mother.
Motherhood is a major preoccupation for Daisy across the final episodes. She wards off having children for fear of inflicting the kind of trauma Daisy experienced upon them. Then, after a crushing phone call with her absentee mother in the finale, Daisy shouts, “Next time you wanna hear my voice, how ’bout you try the fucking radio.”
“I didn’t experience it personally, but I’ve seen [that mother-daughter dynamic] with a few people in my life. And it’s totally heartbreaking,” Keough says. “Some people are lucky to have mothers that are very nurturing and loving, and some people aren’t. That is a place of great wound, when either parent isn’t showing up in the way that the child wants them to. It is supposed to be the one person who loves you no matter what. And so when you don’t experience that, I could see how that could turn into, Well, I’m not lovable because the one person who’s supposed to love me more than anything in the world doesn’t. Not to say I don’t think her mom ever loved her, but it’s a very complicated relationship and woman.”
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