“I met him at his house and he played the drums for me”: As he prepares to play him in the Beatles biopics, Barry Keoghan has been studying Ringo Starr’s technique up close

Barry Keoghan, the actor who is set to play Ringo in Sam Mendes’ forthcoming set of Beatles biopics, has revealed that he met the man himself and has seen his drumming technique up close.

Appearing on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Keoghan – looking impossibly boyish, even at 32 - talked about the encounter.

“I met him at his house and he played the drums for me. He asked me to play but I wasn’t playing the drums for Ringo.” The actor intimated that he was just too nervous. So nervous, in fact, that he even couldn’t look Ringo in the eye.

Barry Keoghan on Playing Ringo Starr, Watching Him Play Drums & Sparring with Chris Hemsworth - YouTube

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“It was one of those moments when you’re in awe,” Keoghan said. “(I) just froze.”

Inevitably, being an actor and aware of the huge role that he has coming up, Keoghan was observing the 84-year-old Beatle and inwardly absorbing.

“I was and I said that to him. My job is to observe and take in the mannerisms and study him. But I want to humanise him and bring feelings to it, not just imitate.

“But he was just lovely,” Keoghan told Kimmel. “(We) just sat in the garden chatting away.”

Keoghan was the first of Mendes’s fab four to be cast. Indeed, Ringo himself broke the news last year, saying of Keoghan to Entertainment Tonight: “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many.”

The other actors were confirmed last month at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas. Paul Mescal, who starred in Gladiator II and All Of Us Strangers is yer man McCartney; Joseph Quinn, who you might have seen in Stranger Things, is George; and Harris Dickinson follows in a long line of actors who’ve played John Lennon.

All four movies are all currently pencilled in for April 2028. "I just felt the story of the band was too huge to fit into a single movie, and that turning it into a TV mini-series just somehow didn't feel right,” offered Mendes at CinemaCon as an explanation for the one-film-per-Beatle gambit.

"Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys. They intersect in different ways - sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history."