'He's taking drum lessons' – Ringo Starr gives blessing to Irish actor ...

The 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 Dubliner Keoghan (31) 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,” Starr said.

“Oh, really?” the interviewer responded.

“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 said. “You’ve got to let them get their own feel for it.”

Starr suggested too many drum lessons could be to the detriment of an aspiring musician.

Paul Mescal is also believed to be in the running for a role in Mendes’s ambitious project.

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 black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, for which Keoghan received a Best Supporting Actor nomination at last year’s Academy Awards.

He 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 Gladiator II actor Mescal, Stranger Things star Joseph Quinn and Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson among the names rumoured for McCartney, Harrison and Lennon respectively.

The biopic 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 break-up in April of that year.

The documentary follows the group as they make their Grammy-winning album Let It Be, its Oscar-winning title song, and as they do their final performance as a band.

“I was always moaning about the original film, because there was no real joy in it,” 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.”

I know I can bring out something great in you… I hope to bring out the same kind of greatness in all of us

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+ today.

Starr is preparing to release his first album in six years, the country-influenced Look Up, in January.

Lennon often complained of the “torture” of touring with The Beatles as he tried to recruit Eric Clapton into a supergroup of musicians.

A heartfelt letter from Lennon to Clapton in the 1970s outlined the Beatle’s desire to collaborate with his fellow English musician, as he wished to “bring back the balls in rock ’n’ roll”.

The rare handwritten eight-page document, dated September 29, 1971, was written weeks after the release of Lennon’s Imagine album, and reveals he was contemplating a drastic change in sound as his post-Beatles career was beginning to take off.

It outlines Lennon’s proposal of a “nucleus group” involving himself, Clapton, Klaus Voorman, Jim Keltner, Nicky Hopkins and Phil Spector, the producer who created the “wall of sound” and who was convicted of murder in 2009.

“You must know by now that Yoko and I rate your music and yourself very highly,” Lennon told Clapton. “You also know the music we have been making and hope to make.

“Anyway… after missing the Bangladesh concert we began to feel more and more like going on the road, but not the way I used to with The Beatles, night after night of torture.”

By that point, Clapton had already joined the supergroup Cream with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker; Lennon was suggesting Voorman on bass, Keltner on drums, Hopkins on keys and piano, Clapton on lead guitar and himself on vocals.

“I know I can bring out something great in you… I hope to bring out the same kind of greatness in all of us,” he wrote. “No one will be asked to do anything they don’t want to... no contracts. We’re not asking for your name, it’s your mind we want.”

Lennon’s negative depiction of touring with The Beatles would later be elaborated on in a 1975 interview, in which he confirmed that shows with the Fab Four had put him off touring as a solo artist.

“My decision was already made on touring a long time ago,” he said. “I think it would be a drag… I am sure I enjoyed parts of it, but not much of it.”

He had previously been less-than complimentary about recording with the band, too, in a Village Voice interview recorded shortly after The Beatles’ final album, Let It Be, was finished.

“We were going through hell,” Lennon had said in the conversation, which was not unearthed until 2013. “We often do. It’s torture every time we produce anything.”

His letter to Clapton was written during a particularly fraught time in Clapton’s life, when he was pursuing Patti Boyd, the first wife of Lennon’s ex-bandmate George Harrison, to whom he was a friend and frequent collaborator.

Earlier this year, auction house Christie’s listed a number of letters from Clapton to Boyd while she was still married to Harrison, including one 1970 message that read: “What I wish to ask you is if you still love your husband, or if you have another lover? All these questions are very impertinent I know but if there is still a feeling in your heart for me... you must let me know!”

Speaking to Christie’s, Boyd said she had assumed it was a “letter from a weird fan” and only realised it was Clapton when he followed up with a phone call.

Lennon’s letter to Clapton will be auctioned next Thursday.