Paul McCartney wants to remind everyone: The Beatles were all around the same height. (Save for five-foot-six Ringo Starr.) But if you took everything in the quartet of Sam Mendes-directed band biopics as fact, you’d think otherwise. In the film series, Paul Mescal plays the Liverpooler, while Harris Dickinson takes on the role of John Lennon. McCartney’s qualm about the casting? Dickinson is six-foot-two and towers over the much-shorter Mescal. It’s a glaring height difference that McCartney says he took up with Mendes, as he revealed on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast.
“I said: ‘Sam, I’ve got just one thing that I need to say to you,” begins McCartney. “You know, Paul [Mescal is] a bit smaller.’ I don’t know how Sam’s gonna deal with it. He sent me a picture, a still from the filming they were doing, and they’re crossing the Abbey Road crossing, and the Paul character is markedly smaller. I texted him: ‘Sam! Smaller? Don’t do this! You said you wouldn’t do it,’” he recalls.
This isn’t the first on-screen adaption that’s featured a fictionalized Lennon who’s markedly taller than McCartney’s character—something that McCartney also brings up during the podcast. In 2009, Sam Taylor-Johnson cast her future husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Lennon in the biopic Nowhere Boy. Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays McCartney in that film, and in one scene, is knocked down by Lennon who’s colossal compared to Brodie-Sangster.
“My character [in Nowhere Boy] is kind of wimpy, smaller than John, and John knocks me to the floor,” McCartney recounts to Poehler. “I’m [like], ‘Sam, this is not true!’ And her only explanation was: ‘This is a movie. It’s not a documentary.’”
McCartney goes on to say that Mendes later sent him a still that shows them all as “equal,” seemingly assuaging the musician’s concerns about how he will be represented in the film. Turns out you can have 18 Grammys, gain admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice), and be a literal knight, and still harbor some insecurity about your height. Welcome to the club, Paul.