Suki Waterhouse writes heartbreak songs on Daisy Jones & the Six

It’s been a wild ride for rock goddess Suki Waterhouse.

The shaggy model-turned-actor-singer spent more than two years impersonating a wayward keyboardist on Prime Video’s hit series Daisy Jones & the Six – the final two episodes of which are about a fictional ’70s band on Appearing Friday – while pursuing her own very real music career.

A few months before the show premiered at the top of the television and music charts, Waterhouse helmed a 22-night tour, including a sold-out show at New York’s Webster Hall. Bathed in violet light and clad in Saint Laurent spandex pants with a high-necked sheer blouse, she sang haunting tracks from her debut album “I Can’t Let Go” to an admiring crowd who knew the words.

“It was one of the greatest nights of my life,” the glamorous 31-year-old tells Alexa. “I’ve only been on stage for a year and the rooms have grown from 100 to almost 2,000 people so quickly. I was kind of amazed.”

During the week of her Alexa cover shoot, Waterhouse was on a tightly scheduled promotional tour for “Daisy Jones,” showing up all over town in banging retro outfits. For a photo op at the Empire State Building with the cast, she looked like she stepped out of a time machine in Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini denim hot pants, Adrienne Landau fluffy faux fur coat, floral choker and giant sunglasses.

Wearing similarly provocative attire, Waterhouse played big concerts for her role in Daisy Jones, an adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel of the same name. The book was inspired in part by the epic love story between Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. The series stars Riley Keough (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) and Sam Claflin as dueling lead singers who deal with jealousy, addiction and damaged childhoods. Waterhouse’s character, Karen Sirko, was loosely based on the supergroup’s English keyboardist and vocalist, the late Christine McVie.

In order to prepare for her part, Waterhouse was to take three months of intensive piano lessons. But with interruptions and beginnings related to COVID-19, that period stretched to a year and a half of three hours a day of classes and rehearsals at Sound City, the legendary Los Angeles recording studio.

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“I was so terrible at first, I was writing nursery rhymes, and then within a year I was doing Bach pieces,” she says. “Actually, without the pandemic, musically we would probably have been a complete disaster. We had 12 songs to learn – studio versions and live versions – and a lot was changed. They really wanted us to be absolutely confident and play every single note right.”

The catchy tunes fill “Aurora,” the blockbuster record the imaginary group dropped before they broke 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 electrifying that an Atlantic Records-backed album featuring tracks sung by the cast was released on March 2. Within hours, it reached #1 on the iTunes chart in the US (a first for a fictional band). Vinyl version reached Amazon.

“I’m in heaven,” gushed one listener on YouTube. “I NEED MORE,” begged another.

Filming the Six’s last sold-out show (at New Orleans’ Tad Gormley Stadium, disguised as Chicago’s Soldier Field) turned into an almost apocalyptic adventure.

“We’re all getting tested, Sam’s getting COVID and we’ve got to push back a few days or a week,” Waterhouse recalled. “And then we go back to the football stadium and we’re about to go back on stage. And there’s a tremendous storm and the stage starts falling over. And we’re pinned down in our trailers and we can’t move and there’s lightning. There were so many moments of anticipation.” But in the end, they captured the adrenaline and rush of one final concert before the band called it a day.

Music has always been a passion for Waterhouse, who kept a journal and wrote songs for years. But the cool girl from London — the daughter of prominent plastic surgeon Norman Waterhouse and his wife Elizabeth, an oncology nurse — took up modeling. A few years after she was spotted in a shop at the age of 16, she was named the face of Burberry fragrance Brit Rhythm 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, big eyebrows, an eclectic wardrobe and glamorous childhood friends like Georgia May Jagger and Cara Delevingne, she had an easygoing manner and a cheeky grin that the camera loved.

High-profile relationships only added to her appeal. She dated English musician Miles Kane for two years, then met actor Bradley Cooper at an awards show at 21, leading to a hilarious hairstyling disaster — and chic appearances at the Oscars, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Met Gala and the London fashion week. After their painful breakup, she was reconnected with actor Diego Luna, whom she met on the set of her movie The Bad Batch.

For the past five years, she has worked with Robert Pattinson on Twilight and Batman. The low-key couple live together in London and Los Angeles and have been photographed kissing in parks or going out, but she’s wary about their romance.

“There’s so much to love about him that I’d be here all day,” says Waterhouse, who is confident, thoughtful and always polite. “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 self-confessed vocal single, Brutally.

“It was kind of in the middle of that depressive phase of my heartbroken life, and it was a time when I felt like everything was going to end. It was a song of firsts: the first big heartbreak and the first time I felt like I had written something I was ready to share and the first song I put out.

She cautiously dropped a track a year and eventually gained the confidence to put out a full-length album, which was released last May via Sub Pop. “It took me years to feel like I was ready to make the album. It grew out of such a simple need to be able to make sense of what was going on around me and relationship breakdowns. Also, if I’m being honest with myself, my early 20’s were pretty full of boisterousness and suddenly becoming a public person. It’s kind of like a little trauma, especially when you’re so young. You’ve basically left your parents’ house and realize you have so much to do and you don’t have all the tools yet.”

Alternately fragile, thoughtful and brave, her album reflects the drama of a life unexpectedly thrust into the limelight. 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] I was asked by the security guard to come back with a few hundred thousand diamonds on it,” explains Waterhouse wryly.

In November, she followed her first attempt with Milk Teeth, a six-song EP and a string of shows in Europe and the UK.

Now that Daisy Jones has been released, Waterhouse is back on the road playing her own music at Lollapalooza festivals in South America. She’ll be back on the East Coast this spring with gigs in Atlanta and the Gov Ball in Queens.

When she’s not traveling the world, Waterhouse just wants to give nesting a spin. “Free time is like choosing a couch with my boyfriend. I’m really enjoying this part of my life right now. I’m trying to figure out what kind of sheets I want and picking out photos to frame. When I’m not working, I want to invest all my time in making home feel like home.”

Sounds like she might add a domestic goddess to her growing resume.

Fashion Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Image editing: Jessica Hober; fashion assistant: Madeleine Shepherd; Hair: Kevin Ryan for Frankie Salons; make-up: Maria Riskakis at The Wall Group; Manicure: Aki Hirayama at Tracey Mattingly