Ringo Starr appears to have let slip who will be playing him in Sam Mendes’s forthcoming four-film Beatles biopic.
The legendary drummer will be the subject of one of four separate movies, each told from a Beatles’ point of view.
It marks the first time since the Fab Four became the biggest pop group in history that members Starr and Paul McCartney, and the families of the late John Lennon and George Harrison, have granted the rights for their full life story and music.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Starr appeared to confirm rumours that Irish actor Barry Keoghan had been lined up to play him in the film about his life.
“Well, I think it’s great, and I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons,” he responded.
“Oh really?” the interviewer responded, looking surprised.
“I hope not too many,” Starr joked.
Asked what he would teach Keoghan, Starr began to demonstrate a rhythm on his knees: “I gave that lesson to my son, he was 10, and I said I’ll give you another lesson.”
He proceeded to demonstrate another beat on his lap: “He said, ‘I can do that dad.’ And I said, ‘You’re on your own.’”
“You’ve got to let them get their own feel [for it],” Starr explained, suggesting that too many drum lessons could be to the detriment of an aspiring musician.
Keoghan began to gain recognition around 2017 after starring in both Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk and in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the latter opposite Colin Farrell.
He and Farrell were reunited in 2022, in Martin McDonagh’s critically adored black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, for which Keoghan received a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 2023 Academy Awards.
The Dublin-born actor then starred in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, for which he received nominations for a Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Actor. This year, he had a cameo opposite Robert Pattinson’s The Batman that appeared to set him up for a major role in the superhero franchise.
The potential casting for Mendes’s films has been the subject of intense speculation, with Gladiators actor Paul Mescal, Stranger Things star Joseph Quinn and Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson among the names rumoured for McCartney, Harrison and Lennon, respectively.
It was announced shortly before the release of Beatles documentary Let It Be on Disney+, after it was first aired in May 1970 in the aftermath of the band’s breakup in April of that year.
It follows the record-breaking group as they make their Grammy-winning album Let It Be, its Oscar-winning title song and they perform their final performance as a band.
“I was always moaning about the original film, because there was no real joy in it,” Ringo Starr told The Daily Beast.
“Now it’s got a start, a middle, and a finish. The start is very slow, and then we get into creating, and then we’re at it and then we’re out. I love it. But I’m in it, of course, so six hours is never long enough.”
Martin Scorsese is now preparing to release his own Beatles’ retrospective about how the “Twist and Shout” singers broke America, featuring newly recorded interviews with Starr and McCartney. It is scheduled to air on Disney+ on 29 November.
Meanwhile, Starr is preparing to release his first album in six years, the country-influenced Look Up, in January 2025.
