OK, But Couldn’t ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ Have Just Cast Older Actors?

I am haunted by the flash-forwards to the future in the Daisy Jones & the Six series because they are so hilariously unconvincing.

Based on the best-selling fiction novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & the Six is written as a series of interviews with the (sadly, not real) band from which the title gets its name. In the world of the novel, Daisy Jones and the Six were the biggest band of the ’70s, thanks to their acclaimed album Aurora until one night in 1977 when the band suddenly disbanded mid-tour. But now, after 40 years, they’re finally ready to talk about what happened.

The Amazon Prime series inspired by the novel premiered this month, emphasis on inspired. Starring Sam Claflin as troubled frontman Billy Dunne and Riley Keough as the talented it girl Daisy Jones, the series features present day face-to-camera interviews as well as flashbacks while discovering that, as the book says, “the truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle.”

There’s just one problem; the show uses the same actors for the interviews as they do for the flashbacks. 33-year-old Keough is both 20-something Daisy in the past and middle-aged Daisy in the interviews – with no aged prosthetics or make-up beyond a handful of grey hairs. 

Using the same actors with minimal ageing make-up diminishes a core element of the novel: the confusion of youth versus the clarity of age. As the saying goes, time heals all wounds and the distance of decades is a huge reason why the band is finally ready to talk.

But having the same youthful actors play their aged melancholic counterparts undermines this idea, giving the impression that these characters are wistfully looking back on an event that happened a month ago, rather than something fundamentally life changing that happened four decades ago.

The series expects you to unironically buy the same actors in their late 20s and early 30s playing the same people also in their 50s and 60s with nothing but a dusting of make-up and collapsing the timeline from 40 years around 20 to sell it. 

Now, look, we all know the power of a good skin-care routine, but no one and I mean no one, looks the same in their 20s as they do in their middle-age. Especially not characters who lived a hardcore rock- and- roll lifestyle without SPF for the majority of their youth.

The amount of effort (see: none), gone into making the actors look older is embarrassing and would be funny if the show didn’t expect you to take it so seriously as characters bare their souls in desaturated tones. In flashbacks, Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) is a strapping young guy, in his late 20s, with curly, luscious locks. What do they do to make him seem older in the 20-years-later interviews set 20 years later? They flat iron his hair, give him a single grey streak and give him some freckles with patchy facial hair.

For Keough’s Daisy, even less of an effort is made. Apart from the character donning a blouse in her interview, presumedly to indicate she’s past crop-top wearing age, she just has… a slightly different hairstyle. It’s specifically, a side-fringe, as opposed to a curtain one. Keep in mind, this series is made by Amazon, whose net value worth is in the trillions, yet they couldn’t afford decent facial prosthetics, old person make-up, or just older actors for the flash-forwards.

But, as a fan of the original novel, I can honestly say centring young and beautiful actors over authentically portraying the passage of time shows is arguably foreshadowing the series’ dedication to a juvenile aesthetic over it story.

The young beautiful cast are very hot in their ‘70s ‘fits. But there’s no holistic sense of the time period. The fitted, cheaply fabricated clothes seem more like fashionable modern approximations one would find under the #70score tag on TikTok in a SHEIN haul, than period-accurate costuming. Why a production studio owned by one of the richest man on Earth couldn’t spring for a few vintage pieces is beyond me, but then again, not every show set in the ‘70s can be Minx. 

Of course, Daisy Jones & the Six is not alone in its lazy approach to ageing characters. House of the Dragon copped similar criticism for how the series aged some characters over two decades and not others. Many a meme has mocked the fact that Daemon Targaryen and Ser Criston Cole, played by the same actors throughout the series, appear ageless while the people around them change into older actors as the characters age.

Some movies and TV shows like Mamma Mia!, Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer reboot, and Apple TV+’s The Afterparty make casting older actors as the young versions of their characters a joke within the story. When they’re in on the joke, comically large wigs and exaggerated era-appropriate clothing all play into the visual irony and it makes for some iconic comedy. 

But there are other examples, like Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding in I, Tonya where it’s clear the filmmakers believed they could get away with using the adult actor for a brief teenage flashback unironically. I don’t think there’s ever been a scene more unintentionally hilarious than the scene in I, Tonya when Margot Robbie narrates Tonya’s first win with the line “I was 15 years old” cutting to a fully grown Margot Robbie in wig.

At the other end of the spectrum there’s Yellowjackets. Set across two timelines in the ’90s and present day, Yellowjackets consists of an older and younger cast for its characters that are so accurate it’s kinda spooky. From mannerisms to looks, each character’s older and younger counterparts are perfectly matched.

The series’ creators, married duo Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle said of the casting process, “Early on we said [the casting] is a really big challenge and I think we really need to focus on the essence of the character as opposed to the specifics of their physicality and in a weird way, by doing that, we ended up with actors who miraculously all could look a lot alike.” 

Yet no such effort was made in Daisy Jones & the Six, which could have been a really good adaptation of an interesting novel. Instead, what we got was an expensive re-enactment of Fleetwood Mac fan fiction. Either way, I am on my knees begging these producers to believe that youth isn’t everything. When it comes to ageing characters, let’s employ some MILFs and DILFs.