Ringo Starr Said Feeling ‘Like S***’ While Filming ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ Helped His Performance

In 1964, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr acted for the first time in A Hard Day’s Night. While filming a new movie was an entirely new experience for The Beatles, they all jumped into their roles with excitement. Starr loved movies as kid and loved the experience of filming one. Still, some days on set were a challenge for him. He revealed how feeling terrible while shooting actually helped his performance.

Ringo Starr had a rough day on the set of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

While The Beatles were happy to make a movie, they found it difficult to wake up for the early call times. 

“It was a very early start,” George Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “We’d have to arrive and get dressed and have our hair and faces done. While all this was going on they would set up with stand-ins. They wouldn’t call us until they were ready to rehearse us for a scene.”

Starr said that one of the early starts was a particular challenge for him. He’d come straight to work from the nightclub.

“I had come directly to work from a nightclub (very unprofessional) and was a little hungover, to say the least,” Starr said. “Dick Lester had all his people there, and the kid that I was supposed to be doing the scene with, but I had no brain. I’d gone.”

Though he felt unwell while filming the scene, he said this helped him give one of his better performances.

“We tried it several ways. They tried it with the kid doing his lines and someone off camera shouting mine. Then they had me doing the lines of the kid and the kid going ‘blah blah blah,’” Starr said. “Or me saying, ‘And another thing, little guy…’ I was so out of it, they said, ‘Well, let’s do anything.’ I said, ‘Let me just walk around and you film me,’ and that’s what we did. And why I look so cold and dejected is because I felt like s***. There’s no acting going on; I felt that bad.”

Ringo Starr said he overall enjoyed filming ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

While this day was hard on Starr, he generally liked the experience of making a movie. He was a lifelong movie fan, and he loved being able to get in front of the camera.

“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “It was incredible for me, the idea that we were making a movie. I loved the movies as a kid. I used to go to a hell of a lot, in the Beresford and Gaumont cinemas in Liverpool. I have great memories from Saturday morning pictures. I’d be into whatever was showing: if it was a pirate movie, I would be a pirate, and if it was a Western I would be a cowboy; or I’d come out as D’Artagnan and fence all the way home. It was a great fantasy land for me, the movies, and suddenly we were in one. It was all so romantic, with the lights and coming to work in the limo.”

He said that because of his love of films, he felt less embarrassed than his bandmates did.

He went on to have the most extensive acting career of all The Beatles

The Beatles acted together in two more films, Help! and Magical Mystery Tour, and appeared briefly at the end of Yellow Submarine. They all also went on to appear in films that were unrelated to the band. Of all of them, though, Starr had the most extensive acting career. 

While many of his films did not go over well with critics, Starr received positive reviews for a number of roles. His best performance was likely in the 1973 film That’ll Be the Day. Critics and his co-stars raved about the honesty of his performance.