Camila Morrone Wanted Her ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ Character to ‘Completely Explode’
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Welcome to My Favorite Scene! In this series, IndieWire speaks to actors behind a few of our favorite television performances about their personal-best onscreen moment and how it came together.
When the time finally came to shoot the finale for “Daisy Jones and the Six,” Prime Video’s limited series adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s blockbuster novel detailing the meteoric rise and sudden fall of a fictional 70s rock band, actress Camila Morrone was ready to loose.
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While her co-stars got to off and play rockstars, her role as Camila Dunne, supportive wife of frontman Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), called for a much more subdued performance until the climactic moment where it’s clear she is no longer the love of his life.
Her character having been the Six’s band photographer from the beginning, Morrone highlighted Camila’s observant nature that actually led to linking together Billy and the titular Daisy Jones, the Stevie Nicks-inspired singer-songwriter played by Riley Keough, who functions as the fellow frontman’s artistic soulmate. “She’s nobody’s fool and she’s always watching,” said the actress of her character to IndieWire over Zoom.
With things coming to a head storming into the hallway of a hotel, as Camila boldly challenged her husband to deny his affection for Daisy seconds before the couples’ quarrel is interrupted by her, Morrone recalls the fiery moments beforehand that the audience did not see, of her and Claflin warming up to play out the end of Billy and Camila’s marriage. “I wish someone had recorded what was going down in that [hotel] room because there were tears and there was screaming and, yeah, it was funny,” said the star. “At that point, we just had to go all out. They were like, ‘You’ve got five takes on each side, then we’re moving on.’ I was just throwing things. Poor Sam was probably like, ‘This girl is crazy.’”
Morrone had made a name for herself starring in acclaimed independent films like “Never Going Back” and “Mickey and the Bear,” but given the built-in audience of Reid’s book, “Daisy Jones and the Six” felt like a massive proving ground. “In the moment I couldn’t even think, ‘Is this show going to be huge?’ Or, ‘How many viewers is it going to have? What if people see this?’ I was just getting through, holding on because if you go in knowing that a lot of people in America are going to see this show, you’ll be really, really extra scared, and it’s scary enough,” said the actress. “So I tried to put away all the expectations of the show and just dealt with one scene at a time that was in front of me because if not, it was just too daunting and overwhelming.”
“But there were definitely moments where I was like, ‘This show’s going to be really good,’” said Morrone. Now, with the limited series entering Emmy season as one of Prime Video’s biggest hits, whose original music even made it onto the Billboard charts, the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie contender was excited to talk below about the work that went into her breakout TV role she rightly anticipated would resonate with crowds of viewers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: Why is the scene in the finale of Daisy Jones and the Six where your character Camila confronts her husband Billy in the hallway your favorite?
Camila Morrone: It’s one of the only times that Billy, Daisy, and Camila are all together in a scene. It’s obviously the season finale, when everything goes down. It also was a very difficult scene for me as an actor because Camila had been composing herself for 10 episodes, and really taking a lot of blows and keeping cool, calm, collected, stable, level-headed. It was just time for her as a woman to just completely explode, and that was really important to me that she had those moments.
There’s a moment in Episode 2 also when she catches him cheating on her with the groupies and she’s nine months pregnant. She pushes him into a wall and she tells him that this is the last time. That moment was similar to this one in Episode 10, where I felt like she was ready to let him have it and just tired of everything, not going to take it from anyone. And of course, the context of what she’s saying is incredibly painful. She’s asking if her husband, the father of her kid, loves this woman because she’s known for a long time that there was a really deep connection and chemistry between these two people, but now this is love and this is really serious. Yeah, that’s why I chose that scene.
How did you prepare for it? Was the shoot sequential in any way to where this was one of the last things you had to do?
No, they never do that. When do they ever make your life easy and shoot them in order? Never. [Laughs] In my experience they’re like, “You’re going to shoot this first happy scene, and then you’re going to go to the crying scene, and then you’re going to come back to the happy scene.” We did divide it into two blocks, so there was block one, which was Episodes 1 through 5, and then block two, which was five through 10. [They] were very different vibes. Camila is a lot happier in Episodes 1 through 5. Once I got in the mindset, we actually did end up filming Episode 10 the last couple of weeks of the show, before we wrapped. And I just felt like I had hit after hit in terms of hardcore, really gut-wrenching scenes because it’s a woman admitting and accepting that her man loves another woman, and the fact that it’s not even physical.
It’s almost like she wishes it was just a physical relationship, or how it had been in Episode 2, just a groupie in a random tour place, but this is a woman who is incredible, who even Camila loves and admires in some way, and that just makes it even more complicated. And there’s also something really sad and awful about wondering how are you ever going to compare with this woman? How could Camila ever compete with Daisy? She’s the biggest rockstar in the world. She’s talented and ferocious and feral and volatile and wild and unpredictable. Camila will never be able to bring that into Billy’s life. That’s a really hard moment to come to terms with, and a really hard thing as a woman to just sit back and go, “Wow. Well, I just can’t ever compete with that. I can only be as best as I can,” and that didn’t do at that point.
Yeah, most of the season she’s deciding to be an adult about the situation in a way, but in this moment, she’s like, “Actually, the boundary has now been breached.”
Yeah, she’s a lot more composed than I would be in a lot of situations, but there’s something really admirable and beautiful about that, and something to be learned about not sweating the small stuff. There’s things that she can handle in her marriage. There’s things she can handle in her life. There’s things she can handle as a mother. And then there are moments when she is like, “This is too far and this is my boundary.” And what a gift to know how much you can take, and then to also say, “This is hurting me and this isn’t good for me anymore.”
That’s the point that she gets to, and I also as an actor wanted to make sure that it wasn’t all, “La-di-da, I can handle anything,” and “Anything that comes my way I handle with grace and poise,” and “Nothing ever really bothers me.” No, that’s not true. We’re humans and things break us. Life is fragile, emotions are fragile, love is fragile. It is so messy, these relationships, and any relationship in one’s life. Relationships with parents and friends are just so complex and multi-layered, so why would this be any different?
I love, too, that her anger here is mostly directed towards Billy. Usually, when we see a love triangle, it’s like, “Why are the girls going after each other when the guy is the issue?” Here Camila is very clearly like, “We’re the married couple. You are married to me.” There’s still a bit of respect between her and Daisy.
Even Riley, we were doing an interview the other day and she’s like, “We’re brought up to pit women against each other, Cinderella,” you know? The story of Cinderella is the sisters fighting for the Prince Charming, and in this story, Billy, Daisy, and Camila are all Prince Charmings. They’re all princesses and princes in their own way, and magical special beings. The fact that they all know that about each other, they can all see what qualities the other’s attained that they don’t have, and where Daisy is stronger and Camila is a bit weaker and vice versa. Really being able to just have so much perspective, that’s what people are really relating to in the show. They’re like, “I love that it wasn’t ‘These two women will fight to the death for this man.’”
Life is complicated and maybe there’s more than one love in someone’s life and maybe you can love two people at the same time, and maybe you can have one big love, and an unwritten story with the other. I don’t know. I just feel like this story and this show opened up a lot of conversations and doors for exploring what does traditional love feel like and look like?
In terms of preparing for the scene, and also preparing for the show, what work did you do with Sam?
Our director Nzingha [Stewart] had us do a rehearsal that morning, and I remember Sam and I were scared of this scene. There was a couple scenes towards the end where we were like, “Oh God, it’s almost that day where we have to do that scene.” It’s so daunting. You’re on a show. It’s got to go fast because we’ve got other things we’ve got to shoot, and you’ve got to reach all these emotional climaxes within just a couple minutes, and a couple tries and takes. I just looked at Sam and was like, “Sam, we just have to go for it, and if I got to push you, I got to push you. If I have to slap you, I have to slap you. We have to trust each other, and I will help you in any way I can and you help have my back, but I am scared, and so let’s do it.”
What was it like working with Nzingha on the scene? Do you remember any sort of direction that she gave?
Nzingha was really good at managing the emotional stuff and pushing me to go one step further, and also how to rein it in, and center and ground it because at the end of that I was on an emotional roller coaster. I didn’t even know up from down at the end. I was so disoriented and confused and tired of carrying the weight of my husband loving another woman for so many months, and what it would feel like to be left for another woman. 10 episodes in, you get tired, and cranky, and everyone’s working really hard. All of those emotions come up and that’s when a really good director like Nzingha will make you use all those feelings and put them towards the scene.
Do you remember how many takes you did to nail it?
It was more than five. I’m a take-hog. I will do as many takes as a director will give me. I’ll do a hundred takes. I’m like, “I love it,” but they don’t ever let me. They’re like, “We’re shooting 12 other scenes today, we got to go.” I remember there was a moment in this scene, I did one a bit more dramatic starting. I was really screaming at him and pushing him, and then they were like, “All right, let’s just use that energy, but physically bring it down a notch.” Then, that’s where we got there where you can see it’s all bubbling up, but I wanted to use that take.
What was your thought the moment when this scene wrapped? And then, what was it like seeing how it turned out?
This was one of the ones that I was like, “Ok, I think that we hit all the beats we wanted to hit,” which I don’t often feel, so that was really nice. Sam had a really good couple goes at it, and I did too. Daisy brought something really beautiful. [Afterwards] I went downstairs to shoot a crying scene with Suki [Waterhouse] in the bathroom that got deleted, so it was just once you’re done with that one, there’s such a sense of relief. You’re like, “Oh my God, the hard one’s done.” It’s like when you’re running a marathon. “Okay, I’ve hit the hard part, and now it’s all smooth sailing from here.”
I can imagine in that moment shooting the scene with Suki, being like “I know the tears are part of this story, but I’m also maybe crying because of the other scene I just conquered.”
I thought I would run out of tears. I was like, “I can’t cry this much.”
“Daisy Jones and the Six” is now streaming on Prime Video.
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