Ringo Starr has spent fifty-six years being asked whether the Beatles would ever get back together, and for most of them he has given some version of the same shrug. This week he gave a different answer. Asked about the band’s legacy in a new interview with Page Six, the 86-year-old drummer said he believes the four of them would have found their way back into a room together if John Lennon and George Harrison had lived.
“I do think we possibly would have got together sometime from, you know, John leaving us to now, if we were all still around, you know,” Starr said, according to Entertainment Now’s account of the interview. “And George, you know, I miss George.”
Asked what he missed most about being in the band, he did not name a record or a stadium. “The friendship, the togetherness, the support of each other,” he said. “I’m an only child. I had three brothers.” It is a line he has used before, and it has not stopped being true. “And for me, it was great. And musically it was dynamite, which it still is out there. You know, the chance to play that. And you know, it’s all happened in eight years.”
The reunion that ran out of time
Eight years is the part people forget. The Beatles were a working band from 1962 to 1970, and they have now been broken up for more than seven times as long as they existed. Lennon was shot outside his New York apartment building in December 1980, forty-five years ago. Harrison died of cancer in November 2001, aged 58.
Between those two dates the surviving members came about as close to a reunion as the circumstances allowed. In 1995, for the Anthology project, McCartney, Harrison and Starr built two new records — “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” — around Lennon home demos supplied by Yoko Ono. In 2023 the same trick was pulled one last time with “Now and Then,” cleaned up using the audio separation technology Peter Jackson’s team developed for Get Back.
What makes this week’s comment notable is that Starr has not always talked this way. Speaking to USA Today in May 2024, in remarks picked up by BraveWords, he was asked whether it was sad that “Now and Then” was the last true Beatles recording. “I think I’m past that, really,” he replied then. “I miss them, but we’re getting on with our own things now.”
Two years on, the shrug has gone. The two accounts are not strictly contradictory — one is about finality, the other about a counterfactual — but the shift in register is hard to miss. Whether that is the difference between 84 and 86, or simply the difference between two questions, Starr did not say.
Still pals with Paul
The other half of the interview was cheerful. Starr and McCartney, the only two left, are still in regular contact. They speak “a couple of times a month,” he said, and it is unfussy: “If he’s in England, we go to visit England, mainly to visit family, we know, we’ll have dinner or we’ll go around and hang.”
The professional relationship has never fully closed either. McCartney has appeared on Starr’s recent releases, and the two have kept turning up on each other’s records for decades. “We’re still pals,” Starr said.
That plain phrasing sits oddly against the scale of what the two men represent, which is probably why it lands. Two octogenarians having dinner when one is in town is the least mythological thing imaginable, and it is the last surviving fragment of the biggest band there has been.
Four films, and a man still working
The interview arrives while the Beatles are being reassembled on a much larger scale elsewhere. Sam Mendes is directing four separate biographical films, one for each member, produced with Apple Corps and Sony and due to arrive simultaneously in April 2028. Barry Keoghan plays Starr, alongside Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon and Joseph Quinn as Harrison — casting Starr himself confirmed before the studio did.
He sounds relaxed about it, if clear-eyed. “I think it’s amazing, actually,” he told Page Six. “The difficulty was he’s putting this story with that story. And Paul and I have to both let go of that. It’s not a documentary… It’s a story of four stories. You know, one on each of us, but, you know, of course we will get in together sometimes. So, we just said, ‘Okay, it’s a movie.'”
He had already signalled as much. Speaking to PEOPLE in March 2025, he predicted the four stories would inevitably bleed into one another: “My life as a lad, John’s life, Paul’s life, George’s life, I mean, it must interact in some way.”
Meanwhile he is still working. His most recent album, the country record Long Long Road, arrived in April, and his All Starr Band — Steve Lukather, Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Hamish Stuart, Gregg Bissonette and Buck Johnson — return to the road on 24 September for a run that ends on 7 October in Albany. One date stands out: 1 October at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, where he has not played since the Beatles’ two sold-out nights there in August 1964.
Sixty-two years, then, between one Forest Hills show and the next. Two of the four men who played the first one are no longer available for the second, which is exactly the point Starr keeps circling back to.
