BBC’s Hamburg Days Begins Filming as Beatles Screen Projects Keep Multiplying

Production has officially started on Hamburg Days, the BBC’s six-part Beatles drama about the band’s early years in Germany before the world knew them as the biggest group on earth. Filming is now underway in Merseyside and Munich, giving the project a real-world anchor for a story set in the early 1960s, when the Fab Four were still grinding it out in the clubs of Hamburg.

The series comes from Succession writer Jamie Carragher and is being directed by The Crown filmmaker Christian Schwochow and Call My Agent Berlin’s Laura Lackmann. It is based on an autobiography by artist Klaus Voormann, and is set in “the smoke-filled clubs of Hamburg’s St. Pauli’s red-light district,” a setting that mattered as much to the band’s formation as any studio session later on.

‘Hamburg Days’ cast including Ellis Murphy (Paul McCartney), Paddy Gilmore (Pete Best), Harvey Brett (George Harrison), Rhys Mannion (John Lennon), Louis Landau (Stuart Sutcliffe), Luna Jordan (Astrid Kirchherr), Casper V Bülow (Klaus Voormann), and Lasse Klene (Jürgen Vollmer)

The premise hinges on a collision between a young Liverpool band still learning how to be a band and two local artists, Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr. The synopsis says they help trigger the shift that turns “a scrappy group of teenagers into the greatest music phenomenon the world has ever known: The Beatles.” That’s the familiar myth, but Hamburg Days is clearly going after the messy prehistory, when the group’s identity was still being assembled in public.

Rhys Mannion plays John Lennon, with Ellis Murphy as Paul McCartney and Harvey Brett as George Harrison. Louis Landau and Patrick Gilmore portray the early line-up’s other major names, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best. Luna Jordan appears as Kirchherr, Laura Tonke as her mother Nielsa, and Casper von Bülow as Voormann.

BBC scripted boss Sue Deeks had already framed the series as a story of compression and transformation. “Hamburg Days is the fascinating story of how, in the space of two short years, a raw young band from Liverpool honed their music skills in Hamburg, before returning home to become an overnight worldwide success,” she said. “It is an incredible story, accompanied (of course) by an amazing soundtrack!”

The BBC project arrives in a crowded Beatles screen moment. Separate from the series, Sam Mendes is making four standalone Beatles films for cinemas in 2028, with Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. The ensemble also includes Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey and James Norton as Brian Epstein.

There is more Beatles-related screen work outside that wave too. Steven Soderbergh is attached to a documentary, John Lennon: The Last Interview, which will use generative AI. And in London, 3 Savile Row, long tied to the band’s history, is set to open to the public next year for what is being billed as the first official Beatles fan experience. Visitors will get access to seven floors of material from Apple Corps’ archives, plus rotating exhibitions, a fan store and a recreation of the original studio where Let It Be was recorded.

Meanwhile, the recordings are still arriving. McCartney has just released his first duet with Starr, Home To Us, which is out now. For a band whose legacy has been endlessly packaged, the appetite clearly still runs deep, and this latest round of projects suggests the machine around the Beatles history is nowhere near slowing down.