Warning: The following contains spoilers for Daisy Jones & the Six Episode 8. Proceed at your own risk!
Daisy Jones & the Six‘s eighth episode (streaming now on Prime Video) left viewers with quite the emotionally traumatic cliffhanger.
After getting fed up with Daisy’s increasingly erratic behavior and her antics on stage during the concert tour, Billy stomped over to her hotel room with the intention of kicking her out of the band. Daisy’s husband Nicky answered the door, nervously assuring Billy that Daisy was OK. When he wouldn’t let Billy inside, Billy pushed his way through the door and found an unconscious Daisy, who had overdosed, in the shower.
“She’s not breathing!” a distraught Billy exclaimed to tour manager Rod, cradling Daisy’s limp body in his arms. He then proceeded to beg her to stay with him as Rod called a doctor.
“It’s you,” Daisy whispered as she briefly came to, looking up at Billy, before passing out again.
“I think for everyone involved, it was pretty hard,” Sam Claflin, who plays Billy, tells TVLine of shooting the emotionally heavy scene. “It was scripted, but not scripted. So much of the kind of pain and the anguish that comes with that and lines that I was sort of throwing in, I was just sort of trying to put myself in that position and get an understanding of what it would be like.”
Claflin adds that there were “a fair few awkward” moments of “trying to get the correct position of where [his costar Riley Keough’s] head was for the camera.”
Trying to nail the story beats of the pivotal Billy and Daisy moment, as well as the logistics, made for a doubly daunting task. “Physically, it was [as] taxing as much as it was emotionally,” Claflin says.
But the effort was well worth it because the scene impressed author Taylor Jenkins Reid, on whose book the series is based, even though it wasn’t a part of her novel.
“There are a few moments that I was really, really taken with. There were even moments where I was like, ‘Damn, why didn’t I do that?’ which is a testament to the writing on the show. Billy finding Daisy in the shower is really moving,” Reid says.
Daisy Jones & the Six fans, what did you think of Episode 8’s ending? Hit the comments!