Riley Keough, Niki Caro to rock Amazon original series ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’
Riley Keough appears in “The Girlfriend Experience.” [Starz photo]
Director Niki Caro (“While Rider,” Disney’s upcoming live-action “Mulan”) is also on board the show, based on the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Caro will direct multiple episodes, including the initial installment, and will work as executive producer alongside Reese Witherspoon.
“Daisy Jones & The Six” is executive produced by Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter for Hello Sunshine, Brad Mendelsohn for Circle of Confusion, Caro and showrunner Will Graham. Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber created the series and also serve as executive producers, with Reid as producer, according to Deadline.
Written as an oral history as one of the biggest bands of the 1970s, “Daisy Jones & The Six” chronicles the rise and fall of that fictional rock outfit. Here is the full synopsis of the book:
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late ’60s, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s 20, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
Keough made her big-screen debut in the 2010 rock biopic “The Runaways,” co-starring with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, and next played opposite Orlando Bloom in the feature “The Good Doctor.” She earned a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination for her part in Andrea Arnold’s gritty road pic “American Honey.”
On TV, Keough headlined the first season of Steven Soderbergh’s Starz anthology series “The Girlfriend Experience,” nabbing a Golden Globe nomination, and starred in Barry Levinson’s fact-based HBO movie “Paterno,” opposite Al Pacino.
She continues to move between features and television: Keough next can be seen in Wash Westmoreland’s “Earthquake Bird” with Alicia Vikander for Netflix and recently wrapped Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” and Antonio Campos’ “The Devil All the Time.”
For Caro, “Daisy Jones & the Six” is her second TV project. Her first, the pilot “Anne With an ‘E’” for Netflix — now in its third season — won her a Directors Guild of America award.
Her live-action version of “Mulan,” due in theaters in March, makes her the second woman at Disney to direct a film with a $100 million-plus budget. (The first was Ava DuVernay with 2018’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”)
Caro’s past directing credits include the World War II drama “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” starring Jessica Chastain; the sports drama “McFarland, USA,” starring Kevin Costner; the historical fiction drama “North Country,” starring Charlize Theron; and her Oscar-nominated 2002 breakout “Whale Rider.”
-BAM
explore: Amazon | Daisy Jones & The Six | Reese Witherspoon | Riley Keough. Niki Caro | Taylor Jenkins Reid
Welcome to The Week In Women, an AWFJ Network Blog authored by Brandy McDonnell
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