Ringo Starr Said Feeling 'Like S***' While Filming 'A Hard Day's Night' Helped His Performance
Ringo Starr came to work on the set of 'A Hard Day's Night' feeling terrible. He shared how this actually helped him.
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.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
