McCartney Slams Height Portrayal in Beatles Biopics — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Paul McCartney appeared on the "Good Hang" podcast and objected to the casting height in Sam Mendes' "The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event," noting that Paul Mescal (cast as McCartney) is shorter than Harris Dickinson (cast as John Lennon).
- McCartney insisted the real Beatles "were all the same height, and Ringo was a bit smaller," and said he texted Mendes after seeing an Abbey Road crossing still where the Paul character appeared "markedly smaller": "Sam! Smaller? Don't do this! You said you wouldn't do it."
- McCartney also previously voiced the same complaint to Sam Taylor-Johnson about her 2009 film "Nowhere Boy," where Aaron Taylor-Johnson's taller John Lennon knocks down the shorter McCartney character (played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster); Taylor-Johnson replied, "This is a movie, it's not a documentary," which McCartney said he didn't like.
- Mendes is directing four separate Beatles films centered on each band member, with Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr; the project is backed by Sony Pictures and all four are slated for theatrical release in April 2028.
- Producer Pippa Harris told the BFI London Film Festival that audiences won't see all four films in one day but rather "within the same month — you might see one a week, or you might see one weekend and two the next and one the next."
Why it matters: McCartney is one of the few living subjects of the Mendes project, and his repeated public objections over years — to both the 2009 "Nowhere Boy" and now the 2028 four-film event — give Mendes a live counterweight to the studio's preferred dramatic framing heading into a $400M-scale production cycle.
Ask SkimNews
