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The Women of Daisy Jones Know: There Was Never Only One Love Story

Five women behind the hit series reflect on the show’s complicated finale—and the relationships between them that made it work.

The love triangle—you know the one—was always destined to absorb the spotlight. In both the Daisy Jones and the Six television series and the book upon which it’s based, the attraction between rockstars Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) is the tidal wave around which the other characters are forced to swim, and sometimes drown. That, of course, includes Camila Dunne (Camila Morrone), Billy’s first love and, rather inconveniently, his devoted wife. Like the real-life ’70s rumors that inspired it, Daisy and Billy’s barely restrained passion ignites and devours everything in its orbit, hitting its peak in the show’s highly anticipated final episodes, out now on Prime Video.

The problem with this love triangle is also its greatest asset: It draws the eye. It captures your attention. As it revs up, so does the intensity of the entire series. But such an all-consuming romance makes it easy to miss what the women of Daisy Jones know from spending years with their characters: There was never just one pair setting sparks. Everyone needed electricity thrumming between them, and particularly the actresses, each playing a woman at odds with their circumstances—and in need of allies.

“It’s so funny,” says Morrone, when I call her to discuss the series’ final episodes. “Because when I signed on, I had to chemistry read with Riley. Most people would be like, ‘Why are you chemistry reading with Riley when Billy Dunne is your husband?’” Morrone thinks it’s obvious: “These two women do have to have chemistry. It’s chemistry in that two women—really, at their core—love each other, and really admire qualities that each of them doesn’t have that the other has.”

The reason the series works on any level is because Daisy and Billy are not the only characters caught in a web of lust and identity crisis, loyalty and insecurity, nor are they the ones they can depend upon to untangle it. Out of the entire cast, Daisy Jones’ four main women—Daisy, Camila, Karen (Suki Waterhouse), and Simone (Nabiyah Be)—are the characters most earnestly forming support systems between them. (Platonic love triangles, if you will.) The show would not work without them. They fight for one another’s wholeness in a pre-“lean in” era but amid the Women’s Liberation Movement, when “multi-faceted” was only just becoming a more common adjective lofted at women of child-bearing age. As such, it’s possibly inaccurate to call Daisy, Camila, and Billy’s imbroglio a classic love triangle: Daisy and Camila have too much respect for each other to open fire.

When I bring this up with Keough, she shares the same core belief: Daisy and Camila want what the other has, and that Billy isn’t the exclusive target of their yearning. Camila wants Daisy’s magnetism. Daisy wants Camila’s security. They’re just as much in relationship with each other as Billy is with them. “A lot of women, including myself, don’t feel like they, maybe, meet the standard of ‘woman, mother, wife’ that has been fed to our society,” Keough says. “I think Daisy’s very triggered by this perfect woman in Billy’s eyes and in her eyes.”

That insecurity ultimately manifests not as outrage, but in a key moment of foresight between the women. In a scene during the penultimate episode, the band touches down in The Six’s hometown of Pittsburgh, and Daisy gets a first-person look into the glow of Camila’s family life as she plays with the Dunnes’ daughter, Julia. “She is obsessed with you,” Camila tells Daisy, later asking the singer if she ever thinks about having kids. Daisy bats away the idea instinctively. She was an inconvenience to her own mother; as a card-carrying hot mess herself, she’d prefer not to inflict the same traumas on a child of her own.

Camila leans back on her wrists, assessing the woman she’d be forgiven for perceiving simply as competition for her husband’s bed. Instead, she says, “Don’t count yourself out this early, Daisy. You are all sorts of things you don’t even know.”

It’d be tempting to interpret this as a bit of condescending traditionalism, force-feeding motherhood upon the unwilling simply because all women must eventually want children, right? But then Camila does something interesting. She walks up to the back porch, where The Six’s keyboardist, Karen, has emerged with an air of terror.

Karen never says what’s affixed that lightning-bolt look to her face, but we know from episodes prior: She’s pregnant, accidentally, and with the baby of Billy’s brother, Graham (Will Harrison). It takes no more than a few seconds for this reality to dawn on Camila. After releasing a slow breath through pursed lips, all she says is, “I’m sorry,” as she draws Karen into her arms. Later in the episode, Camila drives Karen to a reproductive health clinic, and Karen gets an abortion. Camila never tries to convince her otherwise.

Filmmaker Nzingha Stewart—who directed multiple Daisy Jones and the Six episodes, including the final two—says there was originally a scene in which Camila and Karen discussed Karen’s decision, but ultimately, she and co-showrunner Scott Neustadter decided it wasn’t necessary. Camila’s actions communicated everything important about her commitment to Karen, even as she, herself, asked Billy if they might have another baby. The juxtaposition of these three scenes—Camila telling Daisy not to give up on being a mother, Camila supporting Karen’s choice to never become one, and Camila hoping to expand her own family with Billy—was “one of the most important things in the episode,” Stewart says.

 

“What [the characters] were doing in that moment is saying, ‘Motherhood is a beautiful part of being a woman, but it doesn’t define you as a woman,’” Stewart says. “‘It’s not what makes you a woman.’ And that was in the ’70s!” She pauses, thinking back to an exchange in her own life, when the subject of motherhood came up during a writers’ room meeting on a different project.

“The [other writers] were like, ‘Well, [all women] really want kids,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘I don’t.’ And literally a man said to me, ‘Then, what is your point?’”

And so it was, in perhaps a less obtuse manner, with Karen’s boyfriend, Graham. When Karen reveals her pregnancy, he’s ecstatic and supportive, already assuming she’d leave the band to care for the child. (Says Waterhouse when I ask about this scene: “It’s like a nightmare. You can’t hate him. It’s sort of like a sweet misogyny.”) After later learning of her abortion, he tries to jab her with a bit of his own pain. “You’re gonna be alone, forever,” he tells her. “You know that, right?”

It’s not Graham who understands Karen’s need for independence, but rather Camila, ironically the ideal of the “young wife, young mother” trope. Morrone thinks that depiction echoes the reality of female friendships in her own life. “I’ve got friends who—even at my age, I’m 25—they already know that they don’t want to be moms,” she says. “I want to have four children, and I can’t wait to be a mom. And it’s the thing I look forward to the most in my life. And that doesn’t create a wedge between us; it’s not even a factor in our relationships.”

Waterhouse also notes the emotional tissue connecting Karen, Graham, Billy, and Camila: while Camila is fighting for the love of her life, Karen is letting hers go. “It’s two conflicting, ginormous decisions to make,” Waterhouse says. “And it’s one of those moments you share with women in your life, where there are decisions that will affect the rest of your life.”

There’s yet another platonic love triangle between women in Daisy Jones: the relationship between disco star Simone, her secret lover Bernie (Ayesha Harris), and Daisy. In an arc absent in the original book by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy’s best friend, Simone, falls in love with a DJ named Bernie as she attempts to shoot through the disco charts and do what Daisy did: become a star. But as Simone’s relationship with Bernie becomes more serious, her one with Daisy becomes more tenuous. Thus the latter becomes one of the more nuanced relationships in the series, ruffled by Daisy’s inherent privilege and Simone’s competing instincts.

Prior to a horrible fallout in Greece in episode 7, when a recently married Daisy accuses Simone of being in love with her, Daisy and Simone were each other’s closest allies in the Los Angeles music scene. “[Daisy’s] relationship with women is a little bit fractured because of her mother, and her self-esteem isn’t super high,” Keough says. Be sees similar parallels in Simone, ones complicated by Simone’s reality as a lesbian Black woman in the ’70s.

 

“Simone was equally lonely as Daisy,” Be says. “It’s just that her way of navigating that loneliness was more strategic than Daisy. She had to always be polite, had to always be smiling.”

She continues, “I think a lot of Black women are really used to living life, experiencing their emotions either privately, or doing a lot of things on their own. [Simone] was so conditioned to fit into a mold that was the easiest one for her to survive...I find that, for a lot of Black women who are able to express their rage and their impatience with the world, it’s also an extremely unsafe way to go about life. So, yeah, Simone is not someone who was as comfortable dealing with her emotions until Bernie comes into the picture.”

Daisy, as thrilled as she is for Simone to have found the love of her life, has a hard time understanding that Simone’s life is now tied to Bernie’s, and not hers. She repeatedly abuses Simone’s trust as she careens between Billy and her husband, Nicky (Gavin Drea), which eventually leads Simone to cut off contact entirely. Only in episode 9 do they finally reunite, with Daisy in tears as she pleads, “I want us to be okay.” In episode 10, when they are okay, it’s Simone who’s the only one honest enough to be straight with Daisy, as the latter shares how Billy’s presence has consumed her life. Maybe she “can’t do this anymore,” Daisy says. “If it hurts you this much,” Simone says, “maybe you shouldn’t.”

This tension leads up to the finale episode, featuring the band’s final concert in Chicago, where it’s clear from the outset that the end of The Six as everyone knows it is nigh. Each of the women staggers through the episode as if haunted by premonition, filming a performance that Waterhouse says “felt incredibly operatic. It felt like the closing number of a symphony.”

Simone, invited onstage to perform with Daisy, has chosen to reject her homophobic record label and forego her dreams for a life with Bernie. Karen has ended her pregnancy—and, soon enough, her relationship with Graham—for even just the chance of a fulfilling career in rock ‘n’ roll. Camila has realized the extent of Billy’s love for Daisy, and believes it best to remove herself from the fray. And Daisy has slowly recognized that she can no longer afford to be selfish. If she remains with this band, it will destroy them—and her with it. As she tells a relapsed, desperate Billy: “I don’t want to be broken.”

As they each reckon with these realities, Daisy makes two choices, one which fans are more likely to discuss, and one which I, personally, found the most intriguing. The first is that she lets Billy go, nodding to him to leave the Chicago stage behind and physically sprint after his fleeing wife. But the second is that, in her billowing white Halston caftan, she floats over to Karen at the keyboards. She says nothing. Karen says nothing. But they cradle each other’s heads on their shoulders, trading a wordless understanding that the story is nearing its end and that, as women, they will be the ones having to make the heaviest sacrifices.

Keough, when asked about this moment, says, “As actors, a lot of our job and musicians’ jobs is to perform despite life. And that was a moment I could identify with. We’ve all experienced that feeling of having to get on stage or film or whatever, and having life happen simultaneously. I think [going to Karen] was a moment for Daisy to let her know that her life is more important than this moment in this show.” It’s a moment of love between these women, a love arguably more pure—or at least less tortured—than the relationships swirling around them in the scene.

As Waterhouse puts it, Karen “knows how valuable these women are. I mean, she never turns on any of them. She never hates any of them. She understands they’re full human beings and their intricacies and how complex they are.” Unlike in virtually all the other relationships in the series, “There’s never a jealousy in Karen.”

Of course, it was always going to come down to the love triangle. In the last, gutting moments of the finale, the romance between Billy, Daisy and Camila finally reaches its apex.

As it happens in the book, so it happens on screen. The characters grow older. Camila gets terminal cancer. And in her interview with her daughter—a grown-up Julia, now chronicling the history of Daisy Jones and the Six for posterity—Camila makes one final request: “One day, when he’s ready, tell your father to give Daisy Jones a call. And tell Daisy Jones to answer. At the very least, those two still owe me a song.”

I ask Morrone what she makes of this scene, what it represents. Is this Camila telling Billy and Daisy to finally get together, after so many years apart? “This is the hardest question that I experienced in the exploring of this character,” she says. “What an incredible woman to know the way that your husband feels about another woman, the way that he loves her—even though he does’t pursue it, even though he is faithful to Camila till the very end. Even though he loves her and chooses her, she always knows in her gut and in her stomach and in her womanly instinct that all of us women have, that he feels things for Daisy that she’ll never be able to compete with or take from him or convince him out of.”

She continues, “To sit back looking at her life and to let her husband go, to understand that it does’t take away from their love and what they had, takes a lot of strength. I think it’s the most admirable moment in the whole show.”

 

When I bring up this exchange, director Stewart’s voice gets thick. “You’re going to make me cry even remembering it,” she says. “I do always sort of think of these projects as my babies. I don’t have kids. I show off pictures of my work. … After we wrapped, Suki and Camila both sent me letters that said there was such a maternal energy, and they felt like they were so taken care of by a mother.”

She gets emotional recalling filming the last scene, when Morrone, who was reading with another actress, requested to read with Stewart. “She was like, ‘I need it to be Nzingha. I need her to ask me the questions,’ Stewart says. “And so I sat across from her, and both of us were crying, looking at each other doing that scene. I said to her, ‘This is real love. I still want this man to be happy. And I still think there may be something there that can be there for him after I’m gone.’”

What Camila understood in that moment was not only Billy’s need for companionship after her death, but Daisy’s growth as a companion. Years later, Daisy is finally, to use her own words, no longer “broken.” Simone—and of course it was Simone—has helped her through rehab. Daisy has developed icon status on her own merits. As she tells Julia, she’s had many great loves. She has a daughter. She is not the woman who once indulged her worst instincts, and tempted Billy’s. Even from afar, even after many years apart, Camila sees that and chooses to extend Daisy love, the chance for long-stalled dreams to be fulfilled.

As Camila tells Julia in one of the most telling line deliveries of the whole series: Daisy’s “made such a beautiful life for herself.” Camila pauses, smiles. “And, well. I’ve always been her biggest fan.”

ELLE

 

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Camila Morrone on That Shocking ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ Finale

We caught up with Camila Morrone to talk about the making of the hit Prime Video series and what Daisy Jones & The Six gets right about love
 
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Daisy Jones & The Six is a love story. But maybe not the one you’re thinking of. 

 

Amazon Prime’s newest series, based on the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six fixates on fictional rock band The Six and their path to stardom. Led by lead singer Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), the group hits on magic when they join forces with wild child singer Daisy Jones (Riley Keough). Billy is a recovering alcoholic and married father of one and Daisy a pill-obsessed rocker who lives at a hotel and parties longer than she sleeps. What could go wrong? 

 

But underneath the will-they-won’t-they tension of the series and its main characters, is another story: that of Billy’s wife Camila Dunne. Played by Camila Morrone, Camila is the honorary sixth member of the group, but is often left home alone with the baby. In each episode, she encourages Billy to continue his music and follow his dreams, but is cheated on, lied to, and disrespected at every turn. In a lesser show, Camila could have been a wallflower easily forgotten given the sexy chemistry of the ill-fated leads. But with wisdom and ease, Morrone gives a defining performance, imbuing her character with an undeniable spark.

 

The former model had only been in two indie films before she was cast in Daisy Jones. But she tells Rolling Stone that she was only interested in Camila because of the agency the writers were able to give her. 

 

“I just wanted to give her strength and power. I wanted her to be strong and spicy and fight back and be flexible, but also to have really strong boundaries. There were some great scenes that kind of gave her that flair and that edge,” Morrone says. “She’s nobody’s fool. I was happy that that was in there because if not, it wouldn’t have been a character I was interested in playing.” 

 

Rolling Stone caught up with Camila Morrone to talk the Daisy Jones & The Six finale, how she became Camila, her favorite Taylor Jenkins Reid books, and much more.

 

What attracted you to Daisy Jones as a project? Did your approach to the role change at all during filming? 

It came to me in 2019, as you know, just like any other audition does, through my agents. I had heard about the book. I had never done a book adaptation. I had never been a part of that. So that sounded really enticing to me. Also, being a book that has such an incredible fan base already — when I signed on the book was a bestseller, so I knew that there was something there before I even got down to reading the book.

 

Then of course, I dove into the book and the rest was history. I fell in love with the style of writing that Taylor Jenkins Reid has. Initially I was very interested in Daisy Jones because she’s a flashier character and you know, the drugs, sex, and rock and roll, and singing and playing guitar. And then I started to be very interested in Camila because she was less flashy, but I believe equally soulful and important to the storyline. 

 

The show does a great job of really showing Camila’s agency as her own person. How and where do you think she fits in with the band? 

What I think I saw in Camila is a woman who’s incredibly deep and powerful. She’s the backbone in a lot of ways. She is the driving force creating that love and stability and home life and encouragement and support for Billy through everything. He would kind of crumble without her. And everyone seems to turn to Camila at some point in the story for guidance.

 

What was important for you to get across in your performance as Camila? 

I didn’t want her to be the “wife of a rock star” or “housewife who’s raising the kid.” What’s really beautiful about Camila is that she’s willing to accept things that are very painful in love and relationships and marriage. Camila has this incredible bird’s-eye view of understanding humans and their mistakes. Just how complicated we all are and how important forgiveness is when you really believe in someone. 

 

While the story is inspired by the Taylor Jenkins Reid book, it takes some big and unexpected swings. One is almost explicitly showing that Camila has her own affair with Billy’s bandmate Eddie. Was that nerve-racking for you to do such a big shift when people are devoted to the specific plot points in this book? 

People are devoted to the book. And I am too in a lot of ways. So, I was initially against it. When I read it in the script, I called the writer and I said, “Are you sure you want Camila to do this? Because it’s going to make her unlikable.” We got into talking about it and I think that it ends up being entirely justified because it is not out of revenge. It is not for attention. It underlines really how important it is to feel seen and desired and what it feels like to be pushed aside and not taken care of emotionally or physically. That’s why I’m really proud of the decision to do what was best for her in that moment.

 

While viewers who hadn’t read the book just found out, you knew the whole time that the person conducting the interview was your character’s daughter. You also knew that at the end of the series, it’s revealed that Camila has died. How did you approach your performances for the final episode, especially this idea that people were gonna have to see Camila without her physical strength anymore

We can only put up with so much, as women, as wives, as partners. And I think that that gives Camila humanity, because otherwise she’s this unattainable, perfect goddess-like wife, and she’s not. She’s human. She is deeply flawed and insecure and afraid, she just contains those emotions really well and she’s quite mature about the way that she handles them. In the season finale, you see a woman come to her breaking point. And even in her breaking point, to know Daisy is what Billy might need next? What a woman! To be able to go, “Maybe I can’t make this person happy anymore.”’ At the end of the day, it takes real love. I don’t even know if I can look at my life and say I could have that kind of maturity in that situation.

 

While Daisy Jones isn’t a real person, there’s definitely an aspect of true life that’s imbued in the story. And you and some of the cast are incredibly famous in your own way. Do you feel like this has put a lot of scrutiny on your own private life? For instance, you’ve had very famous relationships, like with actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Did that ever feel like pressure? 

I just focus on the work. To me, what’s most important is delivering in the job that I do. I’ve been really lucky to get to work. It’s my priority in life and it’s the thing that I love the very most on Earth, and it’s my passion. I’m nowhere near where I want to be as an actor, but projects like this allow me to have some visibility and explore my art. I just feel really lucky that I’m able to do the thing that makes me the very happiest on earth. 

 

From script to filming to final project, creating Daisy Jones & The Six has been a real journey. The production was constantly delayed by COVID-19, which meant the series has been up in the air. Has all of the extra time strengthened your bond to the series and your castmembers? Were you nervous about the reception? 

When you’re in it and you’re filming, you can’t think about, “Is this going to be good?” You have an essence of the character but then you have to be present for your fellow actors and be in the moment. You’ve created this character for all these months that when you get there on the day, you just have to let it go and hope that this character is living somewhere within you. But all that time definitely strengthened our relationships. When we were on hold for two years, we were always waiting for the phone call saying, “You know what? We spent too much money and it’s just not going to happen.” So, now the show’s out and now it’s the world’s. And I guess that was just our intention and our objective from the very beginning.

 

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CAMILA MORRONE

The Daisy Jones & The Six star reflects on her journey into the acting industry and the lessons she has learnt over the years with co-star and director.

Popping up on a Zoom call filled with excitement for her interview, Camila Morrone, or “beam of sunshine” as interviewer Patricia Arquette calls her, instantly proves how she earned her endearing namesake. But, what draws these two stars together? Well, their capacity for unfiltered conversation is most certainly a part of their bond. “How were you conceived?” The iconic actress and director, Arquette inquires, eliciting endless laughter from the young actress who quickly retorts, “Do you want the details?” Aside from their undeniable kinship, what brings the pair together is Gonzo Girl. Based on the novel of the same title by Cheryl Della Pietra, the movie, which stands as Arquette’s directorial debut, tells the story of a struggling writer who takes an assistant job with a controversial novelist. Featuring a cast filled with the likes of Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth Lail and Arquette herself, Morrone stars as Alley Russo, a writer endeavouring to leave her mark on the world. “I think that when you hired me for Gonzo Girl I experienced this emotional wave and I was excited that somebody was seeing something deeper in me and someone believes in me.” Speaking on having experienced her fair share of no’s, the plethora of projects she has on the way and pursuing her ambitions, Morrone confides in Arquette as she covers our Spring 2023 issue.

PATRICIA ARQUETTE: What’s the story of your parents? How did they meet?
CAMILA MORRONE: Oh my God, no one has ever asked me that. My parents met at a club named Tequila in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My mum was 19 and my dad was 27. He was one of the biggest male supermodels in the world and she was just starting her modelling career. He was living and working in Paris at the time, so my mum followed my dad to Paris where they fell in love. They moved to Los Angeles together to pursue acting and I was conceived shortly after.

PA: Wow… So where did you grow up?
CM: I was born and raised in L.A. and then I moved to New York for work for a few years when I was 17, but found my way back to L.A.

PA: We’re in such a business where there’s an outside perspective that everything’s wealth, decadence and extravagance, but you always struck me as someone who had this deep base of being really grounded.
CM: Well, my parents were working actors. I didn’t come from excessive wealth and watching them gave me a deeper appreciation for the business, and also fear, because I know what the other side of the coin looks like in this industry. It can be really cutthroat and scary and can be ruthless. So I think knowing that, while also growing up in L.A., was this great contrast. There can be that aspect of Hollywood which is very glamorous and all the things that are written about it, and yet that wasn’t necessarily my reality.

PA: I had the honour of directing you in this movie Gonzo Girl that we just finished. We had a very low budget and we were scampering around everywhere but you worked so incredibly hard. What is your work ethic? I’ve never seen any actor as prepared as you were.
CM: First of all, that’s literally the biggest compliment anyone on Earth could give me, so thank you. I was good in school and was able to balance my grades with having a job, which at that time was modelling. I just knew that I always really wanted to be financially independent. And I think through modelling, I was able to gain a really strict work ethic, and have a deep understanding of what it is to work hard for your money. If I didn’t show up, I didn’t get paid and I would get in trouble. It was a job.

PA: In Gonzo Girl there’s an undercurrent of competition and desirability and also in Daisy Jones & The Six, I noticed there were a lot of similar conversations. That show takes place after the sexual revolution, right? Have you had fun exploring this territory of women in different periods of time and different mechanisms, survival and discovery?
CM: Yeah, that’s a really great question that I don’t even know if I ever really thought of. I think when I read the character of Camila in the book, it was hard for me to understand why she was giving this guy so many chances. I know the number one rule as actors is not to judge your character, but I was torn. Is she a victim or is she the empowered one? And I think I learned how to justify Camila and understand what she wanted was bigger than his flaws or hiccups. She has such a strong idea of what she wanted out of life and he wasn’t going to take that from her or stop her from having the dream life she wanted. She stays back while her partner goes on the road and ultimately gets to do whatever he wants. It was hard for me to understand her reasoning.

PA: You’ve been working pretty back-to-back acting-wise, you have Marmalade coming out also. Tell us a little bit about that part.
CM: Marmalade is the character I’ve played that is the furthest from me. Looks-wise, dialect wise, background wise, we are so different. It was just one of those jobs similar to Gonzo Girl where I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t know if I can do this, I’m terrified. I want to bail the day before we start shooting, I want to call my agents and say get me out, pretend I’m sick, I can’t do it, I’m too scared.’ But then you just do it, you just rip the band-aid off and go for it. I haven’t seen Marmalade yet, but it was a fun experiment for me to be so big and lavish and gregarious and out there. I try to tap into the parts of myself that I feel align with each of the characters I’m playing and Marmalade was just a really silly, crazy and fun version of Cami.

PA: People can be notoriously mean when they’re preteens and teenagers, how was that for you, especially with the competitive nature of the modelling world? Did you feel supported?
CM: It’s funny because in modelling, I was not the most successful and I had to work on my looks and on my physique, and care about those things. And then when I transitioned to acting, the note I received for the first few years of my career was always that I was too sensual or too Californian. So, I did things to try to blend in more, because I wanted to be taken seriously and didn’t want people to look at my history as a swimsuit model and think that I couldn’t play a deep, interesting and smart character. Luckily, I’ve done projects now where people can see me in that light; I think Gonzo Girl will be a really great example of that. I think that Mickey and the Bear, the film I did a few years ago, was a really amazing business card for me that I could show and say, ‘I promise you I can play a 17-year-old girl from Montana who lives in a trailer park.’

PA: It is this weird gauntlet and all of a sudden, you’re in this labyrinth of wondering which way you should turn. But you also have to be really smart to even recognize what’s going on on the outside. As much as we try to act like we’re progressive in 2023, we really do still diminish women that are empowered sexually or comfortable with their own beauty.
CM: And you would think a casting director would be able to see that but as you said, they’re still biassed and it’s not as progressive as we think – they’re not able to see you unless you come in as the character. I think that when you hired me for Gonzo Girl it just was this emotional wave of, ‘Somebody sees something deeper in me and someone believes in me.’ You could have chosen any actor in the world and it even makes me emotional talking about it now, but for someone to really see you and go, ‘I believe in this person and there’s something here that I like and something here that I can work with,’ those are the moments where you really do feel seen.

PA: How did you end up getting this part in Daisy Jones & The Six?
CM: When I went in for the audition, they were already deep into the process and had a couple of people they liked. I came back for a chemistry read with Riley [Keough] who was already attached to Daisy Jones and I had a great connection with her. We had a really great read and I got the job. Then we went out to find Billy together, which was really a fun casting process. But it is so difficult when you have someone in front of you who’s being vulnerable and trying their best and wants something so badly – how do you look at that person and say, ‘No?’ But I’ve been on the other side of it. I’ve gotten a lot of no’s in my life, sometimes it feels like constant rejection. Then once everyone was cast, the pandemic happened, so we all just held on to this project and eagerly waited to get the call that it was starting. We waited over two years.

PA: Wow, I think you just said something really interesting to me about rejection. As a model you must have to become comfortable with rejection. And I feel like a lot of kids these days struggle with loneliness and they’ve dealt with a pandemic and they want to look like what they see on Instagram and they want relationships they see in movies and they don’t really build up resilience as far as rejection is concerned. You have to fail a lot and little by little you start taking it less personally.
CM: In our industry, for every 50 no’s that you get, you’ll get one yes and that is what keeps you going. That one moment and that one opportunity is worth all the tears and deep feeling of unworthiness. I can’t say that I have found the answer or the balance for myself as I have gotten older. It is a constant struggle and it never feels good and it always hurts on some level. But somewhere in there, you have to believe that if you work hard enough and the universe conspires in your favour, things will come to you.

PA: What was your hardest scene to film in Daisy Jones & The Six?
CM: I remember being in a lot of pain in the last episode when she’s wearing the purple dress when she’s asking him, ‘What can she give you that I can’t?’ I think that scene was very mature and very adult and composed. It wasn’t erratic with screaming, it was a really deep-centered pain of not feeling like enough and loving someone so deeply, but not being able to make them happy. I think that day kind of shook me up quite a bit.

PA: You are a responsible actor. Do you work with a lot of coaches and acting teachers? Have you studied a lot?
CM: I will not walk into an audition or do a self-tape without working with an acting coach. I self-taped and auditioned for so many years, with not a lot of success, and when I started working with various coaches, I realised that they were seeing things that I wasn’t even noticing. So if I did a period piece audition, I remember my acting coach telling me to imagine that there’s a metal rod coming through the crown of your head and coming out the centre of your body and you have a corset on, so your breaths are very small because your ribs hurt. Things I would never have thought about in an audition because I’m not wearing a corset, I’m wearing a tank top. But I realised at that moment that I needed to have someone help me and remind me of these things. Or for our project, Gonzo Girl, there’s a lot of drug use and tripping out on hallucinogens, so I worked with someone with a focus on that because it’s quite hard to play high.

PA: Do you love acting?
CM: I love it more than anything on earth.

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