Daisy Jones & The Six interview: Suki Waterhouse talks preparing for role - 'I was playing keys wearing Henry Cavill’s wig!'

Hit Play above to watch Daisy Jones & The Six cast Suki Waterhouse and Josh Whitehouse discuss whether they thought it was a true story, the making of the show, and playing their own instruments

It’s not often that a TV show comes along that feels completely different to anything else on the box right now, but Daisy Jones & The Six - streaming on Prime Video - is just that.

Based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestseller, the 10-episode miniseries chronicles the rise and fall of a fictional, Fleetwood Mac-inspired band in the 1970s.

It's told music documentary-style, through interviews with "the band" as well as flashback scenes looking back at their rise to fame and subsequent dramatic split.

The band is fronted by rock star Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) and magnetic frontwoman Daisy Jones (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Riley Keough), who play with the other musicians.

BT TV got to chat to two of the members of “The Six” - namely 31-year-old English model-turned-actress Suki Waterhouse, who plays keyboardist and backup singer Karen Sirko, along with 33-year-old English actor Josh Whitehouse (Poldark, The Knight Before Christmas) who plays the band’s guitarist Eddie Roundtree.

Suki Waterhouse, who's in a long-term relationship with fellow actor Robert Pattinson, was so taken aback by the storyline that she couldn’t believe it was a work of fiction.

She tells BT TV: “I just couldn’t believe that it wasn’t a real band! It was one of those books where I knew it was fiction, but I couldn’t stop Googling 'Where is Billy Dunne now?' It's quite extraordinary.”

Music, naturally, is a big part of the show, and the series brought in musicians and songwriters Blake Mills and Tony Berg to create a 25-track playlist featuring new and original songs. This includes an 11-track album, Aurora, which the cast members sing on.

Waterhouse and Whitehouse, along with the rest of the Daisy Jones & The Six 'band', confirmed that music was a big part of their audition process.

“When we were getting closer, we had to come and perform a song,” Waterhouse tells us.

“I was really bad at [playing the] keys at the time. I remember it was Christmas and I found two or three people who could help me learn how to play the piano. I spent the whole time [learning keys].”

She recalls: “I remember, I was in Canada, and Karen in the book has short brown hair, and they were like ‘We need to see you with short brown hair playing keys’. I was doing a film at the time, and I was asking, 'Does anyone have a brown wig?'

“The hairdresser was like: ‘I have Henry Cavill’s stuntman’s wig from this other project, so just bang it on your head at the end of the day'. I was just at home making little videos of myself with Henry Cavill’s wig on!”

Whitehouse agrees that it was a lengthy audition process, although it definitely sounds as though it paid off, as they had to really play their instruments during filming.

“We were playing everything during filming, but we’d really be focusing on doing entire takes of playing everything [and] it was always to a backing track,” says Waterhouse.

“There’s long, long shots, and the camera is going to come swooping down on your fingers, so all of us were like ‘at any point, you better be playing exactly the right note, otherwise you’ve messed up an entire take!’”

The best performance scene to film? The pair agree unanimously - a custom-built stage in New Orleans, which features in episode 9: “It was like we were playing Glastonbury!”

Stream Daisy Jones & The Six now on Prime Video