By Ellen Jones, Opinion sub-editor
Knowing I’m a lifelong Beatles fan, when my friend saw Paul McCartney trending on Twitter recently (always a bad omen for an older person), her first thought was to text me to see if I was alright. When it turned out that McCartney had not passed, but rather had just been announced as the role Paul Mescal would be playing in director Sam Mendes’ four Beatles biopics, she still thought she should text me to see if I was alright.
At the end of March, Mendes’ fab four were confirmed at CinemaCon: in four films all set to release in April 2028 (order as yet unconfirmed), which Mendes is billing as the first ‘binge-able theatrical experience’. Paul Mescal will be playing Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson is John Lennon, Joseph Quinn is George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan will be taking the role of Ringo Starr.
You’d be hard-pressed to name four young, male actors with a bigger presence in Hollywood right now—apart from perhaps Timothée Chalamet, who the musician-biopic draft already called up to play Bob Dylan, in A Complete Unknown (2024). You’d also be hard-pressed to name a bigger band than The Beatles, so it was only a matter of time before the biopic genre, one of the film industry’s most reliable cash-cows, set its sights on them.
All four actors casted are undeniably talented, having led some of the biggest films and television series of the last few years. But the announcement of their roles hasn’t come without criticism: finding four Beatles that satisfied everybody was always going to be a thankless task, but their casting does appear to lend some weight to the accusation that films nowadays greatly prioritise the internet clout wielded by their prospective stars.
Films have to make money, of course. Part of that, especially for original screenplays, is the box-office draw of individual actors, which incentivises the casting of celebrities with ready-made followings, which these four ‘boyfriends of the internet’ undeniably have. Yet it does seem a shame that arguably one of the only projects which could claim its own draw—the fact that it’s about The Beatles, the biggest band of all time—still chose to rely on big names. The line-up can’t help but feel a little lazy on behalf of the casting directors, especially considering how scarce a resemblance some of them bear to their Beatle counterparts.
The Beatles came from an ordinary working-class background, which made the story of their global domination all the more remarkable. Their biopics could have been an opportunity for the filmmakers to debut four unknown actors, and to invest in Liverpool’s own acting talent, but none of Mendes’ Beatles are Liverpudlian—none of them are northern at all. The accent coach expenses promise to be astronomical.
There might’ve been another benefit to casting four unknowns. As great as Chalamet was as Bob Dylan, there seems to be a point where an actor becomes almost too famous in their own right to disappear into a role. It was hard to forget that we were watching Timothée Chalamet pretend to be Dylan, and the high profile of the actors cast for the Beatles biopics might present a similar challenge for creating four immersive narratives (for the best Beatles casting I’ve seen, Backbeat (1994), about ‘fifth Beatle’ Stu Sutcliffe and the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, has Gary Bakewell playing a genuinely uncanny Paul McCartney).
It's not yet clear how the narrative of the band—from their formation in 1960, to their break-up in 1970—will be split amongst the films and their respective protagonists. What Mendes’ four-film approach does offer (apart from four times the revenue) is a unique opportunity to comment on the band’s singular dynamic from four distinct perspectives, to cast the experience of being a Beatle in four different lights, and to hopefully to avoid some of the pitfalls and clichés of the rise-and-fall biopic tradition.
The films are also the first to be granted music rights to the Beatles’ catalog: the soundtracks will be second-to-none, and it’ll be interesting to see which songs each biopic chooses to spotlight. Like them or loathe them, the cultural significance of The Beatles is undeniable—their music, one of Britain’s biggest cultural exports, has been screamed by teenage girls, chanted by men at football stadiums, and in 2008, their song ‘Across the Universe’ was shot into space. If nothing else, these biopics could be the medium through which a new generation become acquainted with art they might otherwise never have explored, and that surely can’t be a bad thing.
Mendes will have to balance mythology and authenticity, to spotlight the music but not at the expense of the characters behind it. The best thing he could do now is probably to go to Liverpool; the second-best thing would be to lock all four of his cast in a hotel room together for a week, the way the band were often holed up together while their fans crowded outside.
It’ll still be three years before these films hit the silver screen, and everyone and their dad (maybe especially their dad) will have an opinion when they do. So, until we know what we’re dealing with, perhaps the fairest thing to do is just to let it be?
Are you looking forward to Mendes' project?
