Barry Keoghan Will Be Sam Mendes' Ringo Starr, According To Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr has all-but-confirmed the actor playing him in Sam Mendes’s four Beatles biopics is—Ringo-style drum roll please—Barry Keoghan. Entertainment Tonight asked Starr if the rumours about the casting were true—other speculation has Paul (Mescal) as Paul (McCartney) and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon—and the Beatle said of Keoghan that “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many.”

So much for a carefully planned casting-news rollout! We can safety assume the Saltburn actor wouldn’t be busy trying to nail the drum fills on “Here Comes the Sun” if he wasn’t locked into the role. And this earlier-than-expected nugget of big-budget biopic news is surely positive, because Barry as Ringo—Bingo? Steoghan?—is an inspired bit of casting. The goofiest guy in modern cinema taking on the cheekiest Scouser who ever slapped some cymbals? Whatever big bucks Sam Mendes is making, they need to be bigger.

You can see this affinity right there in Ringo’s confirmation: “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many”. People always made fun of him for being the least talented member of the Fab Four, hence the famous put-down that he wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles. This kind of reputation could eat up a man’s insides—instead Ringo jokes about it.

That humor and grounded self-deprecation was always there, even at the wild heights of Beatlemania. Take a previous example of Ringo on screen: the real Ringo, this time, in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. It’s a clever, fun comedy which follows the Beatles playing versions of themselves dodging crazed fans and getting up to various hijinks. Starr plays the fall guy wonderfully. He’s forced to look after McCartney’s troublesome grandad, who mercilessly mocks the size of his nose. A young lady in a train carriage beckons Ringo to come and join her, but he doesn’t. Why not, asks George Harrison? “She’ll only reject me,” he replies with flat resignation. “I know the psychological pattern; it plays havoc with me drum skins.”

Who do we know who recently played a fall guy with dark humour but no outright bitterness? Step forward Mr. Barry Keoghan, whose film-stealing turn as melancholic waster Dominic Kearney in The Banshees of Inisherin won him a supporting actor Bafta and nominations at the Oscars and Golden Globes. His much-memed line when his clumsy advances are rejected by Kerry Condon’s Siobhán Súilleabháin—“Well, there goes that dream”—is the kind of thing you’d imagine Ringo muttering when Paul talks over his song suggestions to insist on another take of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”.

In Saltburn, Keoghan plays a genuinely dark, Tom Ripley-esque character, but the film’s viral success owes a lot to when he injects the role with silliness and camp: the Elordi bathwater-slurping; the grave shagging; the naked stately home dance routine. Keoghan plays another goofy, slightly chaotic guy in Andrea Arnold’s new film Bird, and off-screen, he’s all too happy to lean into wild, gonzo fits. But he also has flashes of seriousness: as he told GQ earlier this year, “It’s nice not just being looked at as the weird-looking guy, the unique feckin’ freaky little freak man-child, freak child-man, whatever you want to call it.”

That duality—enjoying playing the fool, but also wanting to be taken seriously—is one that’s key to Ringo too, a man who fought through poverty in his childhood to become the dependable bedrock of a band of flighty personalities. (Not to mention that Ringo’s narration of the first two seasons of Thomas the Tank Engine is a more valuable cultural contribution than a good chunk of John and Paul’s solo material.) We’ll see if the risks of a quadruple biopic pay off when they’re released in 2027, but at least we know Ringo’s drumsticks are in safe hands.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.