While the loose lips of Hollywood have seen the likely cast members for an unprecedented series of Beatles biopics previously leaked in the media, moviegoers and fans of the band got their first look at the four actors playing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr on Monday.
Harris Dickinson, Barry Keoghan, Paul Mescal and Joseph Quinn were officially introduced at Cinemacon in Las Vegas, with Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes also on hand to hype the project, which is being heralded as the first time that Apple Corps Ltd, the company founded by members of the Beatles, has signed off on such a project.
The four films, each told from the perspective of a band member, will be released “in proximity” to each other in April 2028, Mendes said, adding that Sony Pictures executive Tom Rothman described it as “the first bingeable theatrical experience.”
There are few precedents to the ambitious plan; on a much smaller scale, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy of films were released over the course of a year in 1993-94.
Keoghan, at 32, is the oldest of the bunch, and also older than any Beatle was when they broke up in 1970. The ability of the actors to portray the musicians over their dozen-year existence has been the subject of online chatter so far, as well as a debate whether any of them resemble the band members.
A rare recording of an early Beatles demo session has surfaced in a Vancouver record store. As CBC’s Rafferty Baker reports, the tape appears to have made its way to Vancouver about 50 years ago. But exactly how it ended up in the record shop isn’t clear.
In Liverpool, where the lads where influenced by Britain’s skiffle music craze to pick up instruments and form bands, it has not escaped notice that two of the actors are Irish, and two are Londoners.
“They couldn’t have found four Scousers?” one commenter exclaimed, using the nickname for the northwest port city’s residents.
Mendes’s filmography — American Beauty, Spectre, Revolution Road — has focused on fictional characters and not biopics, but he has staged several theatre musicals in his career.
Many questions remain, from the order in which the films will be released, to how the busy actors will be able gel together and capture the band’s madcap energy in their early years.
Nevertheless, the project promises the most sweeping look on film at the group. Previous biopics on the big screen and television have tended to focus on specific periods or storylines, with Harrison and Starr largely overshadowed.
The Birth of the Beatles (1979) and Backbeat (1994) dealt with the group’s earliest years, with the latter film predating Starr’s time in the band. Backbeat — later adapted for the stage — was centred in Germany, with a look at the relationship between Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe, the onetime Beatles member who died suddenly in 1962, just months after leaving the group.
Here are the cast members announced Monday:
Harris Dickinson as John Lennon
Dickinson, 28, has already portrayed an eclectic list of real people in a career just a decade old — Prince Phillip, actor-director Richard Attenborough, oil tycoon scion John Paul Getty III and the doomed wrestler David Von Erich in the Iron Claw.
Dickinson was most recently seen by many in a lead role opposite Nicole Kidman in the erotic thriller Babygirl.
Lennon’s premature death at 40 has seen him the focus of more portrayals than the rest of the band members. Even his assassination has been covered in a biopic, with future Oscar winner Jared Leto playing Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, in 2007’s Chapter 27.
Ian Hart earned praise for his Lennon portrayal in Backbeat, while Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston starred in the public television offering Lennon Naked in 2010, focusing on Lennon’s tumultuous 1967-1971 period when he struggled with drug use, first met Yoko Ono and began to create music outside the group. The couple’s life also got the made-for-TV treatment in 1985’s John and Yoko: A Love Story.
Nowhere Boy (2009) looked at Lennon’s seminal adolescence — his parents split acrimoniously and his mother died when he was 14 — while Two of Us (2000) saw actors Jared Harris and Aidan Quinn play Lennon and McCartney, respectively, as they navigated their relationship in the mid-1970s after the contentious split of the Beatles.
Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney
Mescal starred in Gladiator II and All of Us Strangers and was nominated for an Oscar for Aftersun.
The Irish actor’s participation is not a surprise, inadvertently revealed late last year by Gladiator II director Ridley Scott.
Mescal, 29, told CBC’s Q in 2022 that he didn’t have a roadmap in terms of choosing roles.
“It’s always going to be related to the filmmaker or the director and the source material — if it’s a character I feel like I can represent accurately and truthfully, I’m going to do that,” he said.
While the pressure will be intense to live up to the expectations of fans in any of the four roles, comments attributed to McCartney have seen the music legend express some displeasure with previous portrayals.
Joseph Quinn as George Harrison
Quinn, 31, also just appeared in Gladiator II. The London native first attracted attention to many outside of Britain with an appearance in the fourth season of Stranger Things, and will see his profile raised in the next year or so with multiple appearances as Johnny Storm, the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch, in Marvel films.
“It’s important to follow the stories that interest you, the filmmakers that have something interesting to say,” Quinn told The Associated Press recently. “If recognition comes along … it’s in service of making the film.”
Harrison, who died in 2000, will get his moment in the sun onscreen after being closely associated with the film industry after the Beatles broke up. Harrison’s HandMade Films produced and distributed films which included Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Time Bandits and Withnail and I.
While Harrison hasn’t been depicted onscreen as much as Lennon and McCartney, future Doctor Who and Thick Of It actor Peter Capaldi — sporting a rad mustache — played Harrison in 1985’s John and Yoko: A Love Story.
WATCH | George Harrison in 1969 on the complicated business of the band:
Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr
Keoghan, another Irish actor, has taken a turn on the award show circuit for a few years now.
The Banshees of Inisherin, from 2022, earned him Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, and it won him a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). Keoghan’s performance in the following year’s Saltburn also resulted in Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations.
Starr, who enthusiastically greeted the Beatles film announcement in February 2024, later in the year tipped off to Entertainment Tonight that Keoghan was set to sit on the drummer’s stool for the Mendes movie.
“I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many,” Starr joked.
Ringo Starr in conversation with CBC Radio Q’s Tom Power on how the legendary Beatles’ drummer is making music during the pandemic.
