Hamburg Days Cast Turns Beatles Origin Story Toward St. Pauli

The Hamburg Days cast puts five young Beatles and two Hamburg artists at the centre of the BBC and ZDF’s six-part origin drama, now filming in Hamburg, Munich and Liverpool. Rhys Mannion plays John Lennon, Ellis Murphy plays Paul McCartney, Harvey Brett plays George Harrison, Louis Landau plays Stu Sutcliffe and Patrick Gilmore plays Pete Best.

The better clue sits in the German half of the list. By making Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr part of the core ensemble, Hamburg Days is aiming at the moment before the Beatles became fixed property: when style, friendship, club hours and exile did as much work as any hit single.

The Cast Makes Hamburg the Point

LEONINE Studios, the German production and distribution group connected to the project through W&B Television, said in the principal photography announcement for Hamburg Days that filming has started on a six-part drama from Christian Schwochow, the German director serving as showrunner, and Jamie Carragher, the Succession writer serving as head writer. The production will shoot across Hamburg, Munich and Liverpool.

The role list is unusually revealing for a Beatles drama. Ringo Starr is absent from the main band lineup because the story is set before he replaced Pete Best. Stuart Sutcliffe, the original bassist whose death at 21 has long haunted the band’s Hamburg myth, gets a main slot. So do Voormann, the German musician and artist, and Kirchherr, the German photographer whose images helped define the group’s early look.

The first public image, credited in the announcement to W&B Television and Gordon Timpen, groups the young band members in period costume. But the casting table tells a sharper story than the wardrobe: this is a pre-fame drama built around who saw the band before the world did.

St. Pauli Supplies the Stakes

The show has rich dirt to work with. Hamburg’s official city history says the Beatles first played the Indra on 17 August 1960, after club operator Bruno Koschmider brought the Liverpool group to the Reeperbahn. At that point the band included Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Sutcliffe and Best, not the later foursome fixed in pop memory.

According to Hamburg’s official Beatles history, the group played the Indra 48 times before noise complaints shut the venue, then moved to the Kaiserkeller for 58 evenings. The numbers matter because they cut against the usual montage version of the Beatles story. This was shift work.

The best Beatles origin stories have always depended on repetition. Long sets, bad rooms, late nights, covers beaten into shape. A six-part format gives the series room to make the grind visible, if it chooses the labour over easy myth.

That choice will decide whether Hamburg Days feels like a fan object or a drama. A two-hour film usually rushes from Liverpool to destiny. A television series can sit in the uncomfortable middle, where the band was noisy, underpaid, underage in Harrison’s case and still learning how to hold a room.

A German Side Door Into a British Myth

Voormann gives the production its strongest claim to a different angle. The series is based in part on his autobiography, and Klaus Voormann’s official biography notes both his 2003 memoir and a career that included more than 100 record, book, magazine and concert-poster designs. He later designed the Beatles’ Revolver cover, but Hamburg Days is interested in the earlier friendship.

That is why Kirchherr’s presence matters. In many retellings she enters as an image maker and love interest around Sutcliffe. Here, casting her beside Voormann suggests a wider German circle, not background colour. The title itself belongs as much to Hamburg’s artists as to Liverpool’s teenagers.

• Visual identity: Kirchherr’s photography and the German art-school circle help explain how the band learned to look like something new.
• Witness authority: Voormann serves as an exclusive consultant, according to LEONINE, while the Stuart Sutcliffe Estate also consults on the series.
• Local texture: The city history includes clubs, deportation trouble, the Star-Club and the Top Ten Club, giving the writers more than a greatest-hits path.

The hidden opportunity is to let German characters change the narrative rather than decorate it. If the series treats Voormann and Kirchherr as engines of taste, ambition and loss, it has a reason to exist beside the larger Beatles machine already moving through cinemas.

The Rights Race Around the Same Band

Hamburg Days arrives while a separate Sam Mendes project for Sony Pictures Entertainment is also in production. The official Beatles site describes the four-film Beatles project from Sam Mendes as one feature from each band member’s perspective, with Apple Corps Ltd. and the Beatles’ rights holders granting full life story and music rights for a scripted film project.

That creates a clear split. Sony has the authorised full-career theatrical event. Hamburg Days has a narrower lane, a club-years television story tied to German memory and public broadcasters. Narrow can be an advantage. It forces the writers away from completism and toward pressure, place and character.

The announced Hamburg Days materials highlight David Holmes, the BAFTA-winning music producer, as responsible for the musical score. They do not advertise the same full life story and music rights package as the Mendes films. That may push the series toward atmosphere, club performance and character conflict rather than catalog display.

Public Money Gives the Series a European Shape

The financing stack also explains the shape of the show. LEONINE says W&B Television and Turbine Studios are co-producing for AGC Television, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF, Germany’s public broadcaster) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, the U.K. public broadcaster). AGC International will handle sales outside the U.K. and Germany.

FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, the Bavarian film and television fund, separately confirms the Hamburg Days production start and funder list. The support comes from the German Motion Picture Fund, MOIN Film Funding Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, FilmFernsehFonds Bayern and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

Four public funders mean the series carries more than Beatles nostalgia. It is a German-British cultural export built for broadcasters, streamers and international buyers. That mix usually rewards recognisable intellectual property, local production spend and settings that can travel without needing much explanation.

The locations fit that plan. Hamburg supplies the mythic club district. Munich adds studio and production infrastructure. Liverpool keeps the story tethered to the band’s home city. For a European drama market hungry for English-language projects with known brands, the Beatles are close to the safest global name available.

The Casting Bet Carries One Risk

The young cast gives Hamburg Days room to breathe. Mannion, Murphy, Brett, Landau and Gilmore are not carrying decades of star baggage into the roles. That can help, because audiences bring enough baggage of their own. Beatles viewers notice hairlines, accents, left-handed bass posture and the order in which every famous event happened.

Fresh faces also change the pressure on performance. A celebrity-heavy Beatles drama tends to become a spot-the-impersonation exercise. This one can ask whether the actors feel like a working band before history arrives. Murphy being a Liverpool singer-songwriter gives the McCartney role a useful musical baseline, but the series will still live or die on group chemistry.

The first challenge is chronology. The Hamburg run includes the Indra, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten Club, the Star-Club, the first Tony Sheridan recordings and Harrison’s deportation as a 17-year-old. Those events can become a checklist fast. The production’s smartest move would be to treat them as consequences of pressure, not milestones to tick off.

If Hamburg Days lets Kirchherr and Voormann change the room around the band, the series can make the most familiar pop origin story feel less rehearsed; if it rushes them back into the legend, the clubs will become wallpaper.