India's Farhan Akhtar will step into one of the most storied friendships in music history, playing sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar in Sam Mendes' four-film Beatles project — a casting that connects Bollywood royalty to the biggest music biopic ever attempted.
The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event will tell the band's story in four separate features, one from each member's perspective, with production under way in the United Kingdom and a global release planned for April 2028. Akhtar's Shankar is the hinge between the Beatles and India: it was Shankar who taught George Harrison the sitar, opened Indian classical music and spirituality to the band, and through them to the entire Western pop world.
Akhtar has spoken about the weight of the role, calling it exciting and daunting in equal measure — the part requires him to embody a musician widely regarded as India's greatest cultural ambassador of the twentieth century. He has also noted India's own relationship with the Beatles: his father, the poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, recalls that even in villages where English was not spoken, everyone knew the band. Ravi Shankar is the reason that two-way cultural current existed.
He joins an ensemble assembled at scale: Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, with Lucy Boynton as Jane Asher, Morfydd Clark as Cynthia Lennon and Harry Lawtey as Stuart Sutcliffe in the latest casting round. The films mark the first time the band's full life and music rights have been granted to a scripted feature project.
For Akhtar — an actor, director and singer who built his career in Hindi cinema and appeared in Marvel's Ms. Marvel — Shankar is a genuine Hollywood leading-man moment, in the one role no Western casting director could fill from a London shortlist. The sitar sequences alone will demand months of preparation; Harrison's devotion to Shankar was musical and spiritual, and the films' credibility with Indian audiences depends on getting that relationship right.
Mendes is directing all four films, an auteur-scale gamble on interconnected storytelling that studios had declared impossible. If it works, April 2028 becomes a global cultural event. And at its centre, where the Beatles' sound turned east, will stand an Indian actor playing the master who turned it.
The Shankar-Harrison relationship deserves its billing as the films' emotional bridge. Harrison travelled to India in 1966 to study sitar with Shankar, an apprenticeship that rewired his songwriting and, through songs like "Norwegian Wood" and "Within You Without You," carried Indian instrumentation into the centre of Western pop. Shankar, already a towering figure in Indian classical music, became the West's teacher — his festival performances and his role in the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, organised with Harrison, created the template for the modern benefit concert.
Playing that man is not a cameo. It demands an actor who can convey mastery without impersonation and sit at the still centre of a story otherwise devoted to the four most mythologised musicians alive. Akhtar, himself a musician who writes and performs, is the rare casting that satisfies both the sitar's devotees and the film's global marketing.
Mendes' four-film structure will interleave the same events through four memories; viewers will meet Shankar through Harrison's reverence and the others' eyes alike. For Indian cinema, long accustomed to exporting talent into Western productions in marginal roles, a desi actor as the guru in the Beatles' own authorised epic is a landmark that needs no press release to announce itself.
