Suki Waterhouse on ‘Daisy Jones & the Six,’ writing heartbreak songs
It’s been a wild ride for rock goddess Suki Waterhouse.
The shaggy haired model-turned-actor-and-vocalist spent more than two years incarnating a headstrong keyboardist for Prime Video’s hit series “Daisy Jones & the Six” — whose last two episodes about a fictional ’70s band will drop on Friday — while pursuing her own very real music career.
A few months before the show premiered atop television and music charts, Waterhouse headlined a 22-night tour, including a sold-out show at New York’s Webster Hall. Bathed in purple light and clad in Saint Laurent spandex pants with a high-necked diaphanous blouse, she sang haunting tracks from her debut album, “I Can’t Let Go,” to an adoring crowd that knew the words.
“That was one of the greatest nights of my life,” the glamorous 31-year-old tells Alexa. “I’m only a year into even being onstage, and the rooms have grown from 100 people to almost 2,000 so quickly. I’ve been kind of amazed.”
The week of her Alexa cover shoot, Waterhouse was on a tightly scheduled promotional tour for “Daisy Jones,” popping up all over the city in groovy retro outfits. For a photo op at the Empire State Building with the cast, she looked like she’d stepped out of a time machine in Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini denim hot pants, fluffy Adrienne Landau faux-fur coat, flower choker and giant sunglasses.
In similar slinky attire, Waterhouse played capacity concerts for her role in “Daisy Jones,” adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The book was inspired in part by the epic love story between Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. In the series, Riley Keough (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) and Sam Claflin star as dueling lead singers grappling with jealousy, addictions and damaged childhoods. Waterhouse’s character, Karen Sirko, was loosely based on the supergroup’s English keyboardist and vocalist, the late Christine McVie.
To prepare for her part, Waterhouse was slated to take three months of intensive piano lessons. But with COVID-19-related stops and starts, that period stretched into a year and a half of three-hour-a-day classes and rehearsals at Sound City, the legendary Los Angeles recording studio.
“I was so terrible in the beginning, I was doing children’s nursery rhymes, and then within a year, I was doing Bach pieces,” she says. “Actually, without the pandemic, we probably would have been a complete disaster musically. We had 12 songs to learn — studio versions and live versions — and it would get changed a lot. They really wanted us to be completely confident and playing every single note correctly.”
The catchy tunes fill “Aurora,” the blockbuster record dropped by the imaginary group before they break up. Grammy Award-winning producer and guitarist Blake Mills co-wrote and produced the original music with Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford, Jackson Browne, Taylor Goldsmith, Madison Cunningham and other friends. The result was so electric that an actual Atlantic Records-backed album featuring tracks sung by the cast was released on March 2. Within hours, it reached No. 1 on iTunes charts in the US (a first for a fictional band), while the vinyl version summited Amazon.
“I’m in heaven,” raved one listener on YouTube. “I NEED MORE,” begged another.
Filming the Six’s final sold-out show (at Tad Gormley Stadium in New Orleans, dressed up to look like Chicago’s Soldier Field) turned into an almost apocalyptic adventure.
“All of us are getting tested, Sam gets COVID, and we have to push back another few days or a week,” recalls Waterhouse. “And then we get back to the football stadium and we’re about to go back onstage. And there’s a massive storm, and the stage starts falling over. And we’re kept inside of our trailers, and we can’t move and there’s lightning. There were so many anticipatory moments.” But in the end, they captured the adrenaline and poignancy of a last concert before the band calls it quits.
Music has always been a passion for Waterhouse, who for years journaled and wrote songs. But the cool London girl — the daughter of a prominent plastic surgeon, Norman Waterhouse, and his wife, Elizabeth, an oncology nurse — started out modeling. Several years after being discovered in a store, at age 16, she was named the face of Burberry “Brit Rhythm” fragrance and landed on the covers of magazines such as British Elle, Tatler, L’Officiel and British Vogue. Hailed as a millennial muse with tousled bangs, major eyebrows, an eclectic wardrobe and glamorous childhood friends like Georgia May Jagger and Cara Delevingne, she had an insouciant quality and a cheeky grin that the camera loved.
High-profile relationships only added to her allure. She dated English musician Miles Kane for two years, then met actor Bradley Cooper at an awards show when she was 21. Their two-year whirlwind romance was punctuated by an invitation to a White House State Dinner — where she “looked like crap” due to a hilarious hair-styling disaster — and chic appearances at the Oscars, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Met Gala and London fashion week. After their painful split, she was linked on and off with actor Diego Luna, whom she met on the set of their movie, “The Bad Batch.”
For the last five years, she’s been going strong with Robert Pattinson of “Twilight” and “Batman” fame. The low-key couple live together in London and Los Angeles and have been photographed kissing in parks or on nights out, but she’s circumspect on their romance.
“There’s so much to love about him, I’d be here all day,” demurs Waterhouse, who is poised, thoughtful and unfailingly polite in person. “We just support each other, and that’s the most important thing.”
Just as Waterhouse’s acting career was taking off in 2016 after roles in “The Divergent Series: Insurgent” and “The Bad Batch,” she self-released a raw and confessional vocal single, “Brutally.”
“It was kind of in the midst of that heartbroken, depressive phase of my life, and it was a time where I felt like everything was ending. It was a song of firsts: the first big heartbreak, and the first time I felt like I had written something that I was ready to share and the first song I put out.”
“My early 20s were quite fraught with a lack of boundaries and suddenly becoming a public person. It’s like a mini-trauma in a way, especially when you’re so young.”
She cautiously dropped one track a year and finally gained the confidence to unleash a full-length record, out last May via Sub Pop. “It took me years to feel like I was ready to make the album. It came out of such a simple need to be able to make sense of what was going on around me and with relationship breakdowns. Also, if I’m honest with myself, my early 20s were quite fraught with a lack of boundaries and suddenly becoming a public person. It’s like a mini-trauma in a way, especially when you’re so young. You’ve basically walked out of your parents’ house and find yourself dealing with so much, and not having all the tools yet.”
By turns fragile, contemplative and bold, her album reflects the drama of a life unexpectedly lived in the spotlight. The plaintive “Melrose Meltdown” captures the heartache of an imploding relationship and references a scene that actually happened on the Sunset Strip.
“I was in the middle of a breakup and left the Chateau [Marmont hotel] with a couple of hundred grand of diamonds on that I was being asked to return by the security guy,” explains Waterhouse wryly.
In November, she followed her freshman effort with “Milk Teeth,” an EP with six songs, and a run of shows in Europe and the UK.
Now that “Daisy Jones” has launched, Waterhouse is back on the road, playing her own music at Lollapalooza festivals in South America. She’ll perform on the East Coast again this spring with gigs in Atlanta and the Gov Ball in Queens.
When she’s not crisscrossing the globe, Waterhouse just wants to give nesting a spin. “Free time is like picking out a couch with my boyfriend. That part of my life I really enjoy right now. Trying to figure out what kind of bedsheets I want and picking out photos I want to put in frames. If I’m not working, I want to be investing all of my time into making home feel like home.”
Sounds like she can add domestic goddess to her growing résumé.
Fashion Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Photo Editor: Jessica Hober; Fashion Assistant: Madeleine Shepherd; Hair: Kevin Ryan for Frankie Salons; Makeup: Maria Riskakis at The Wall Group; Manicure: Aki Hirayama at Tracey Mattingly
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