During the Beatles‘ heyday, by all accounts, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had a loving, as well as deeply competitive, personal relationship. And while it ended in messy animosity during the Fab Four’s breakup in 1970 and in a series of thinly veiled musical shots they took at each other in their solo material in the years after — check out McCartney’s “Too Many People” and “Silly Love Songs” and Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?” — in the end they made peace before Lennon’s murder in 1980.
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But, as it turns out, there is still one sore subject you can bring up about the two men that will get McCartney riled up: their heights.
On this week’s new episode of the pod Good Hang with Amy Poehler, the Parks and Recreation star waded into the subject with a simple question about the age gap between the Beatles, which unexpectedly turned into a Macca rant about the one fact about the band that he thinks filmmakers keep screwing up.
“George was how many years younger than you, Paul?,” Poehler asked. “I think like about one and a half [years younger],” he said of the late Beatles guitarist/singer, noting that Lennon was one and a half years older than him.
“Who was the tallest?” Poehler wondered in a follow-up.
Oh boy.
“We were all the same height,” McCartney, 84, said a bit defensively, holding up a finger in emphasis. “You really were,” Poehler said with a sly smile as she willfully opened the Pandora’s box.
“You know I’ve got a thing about that, do you?” Macca shot back as Poehler feigned ignorance and let out a laugh.
“Oh my God. Well, we were all the same height and Ringo was a bit smaller,” McCartney explained to Poehler’s delight. “And if you look at photos, we’re all the same height.” However, Sir Paul noted that director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 2009 Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, featured her future husband and the film’s star, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as a teenage John who, lamentably, is “bigger” than McCartney in the film.
“My character is kind of … wimpy … smaller than John … John knocks me to the floor,” McCartney explained, seemingly still a bit peeved. “And it’s like, ‘Sam, this is not true!’,” he said he told the director, a friend, to guffaws from the pod’s studio crew.
McCartney said the director’s explanation was, “‘this is a movie, it’s not a documentary,'” to which he said he replied, “‘well, I don’t like that explanation'” about the character he dubbed “little Paul” to Lennon’s “great big hero.”
A clearly delighted Poehler then noted that Paul Mescal (5′ 11″) is playing Macca (also around that height) in the upcoming four-part Sam Mendes Beatles biopic series, musing on how strange it must be to watch people portray you in film.
“And guess what? He’s smaller than the guy who plays John,” McCartney said in practiced annoyance of the film’s Lennon, English actor Harris Dickinson (Urchin, The Iron Claw), who is 6’2″.
“I said, ‘Sam, I’ve got just one thing that I need to say to you,'” McCartney said of his note to Mendes about the height imbalance, wondering how the director will rectify this annoying, historic aberration. McCartney then described getting a still from Mendes chronicling the famed image of the Beatles walking across Abbey Road, pointing out, “and the Paul character is markedly smaller!”
Poehler was right there with a historically accurate joke: “and you can’t put lifts on that bare feet,” in reference to Paul being shoeless in the original image. “That’s true! So I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller! Don’t do this! You said you wouldn’t do it!,” McCartney said with a grin, explaining that Mendes said the “stride pattern” is what made the height difference pop in the pic, adding that the director then sent him another shot where the two men were equally tall.
“I say high, you say low/ You say why, and I say I don’t know,” indeed.
Watch McCartney sum up the tall and the short of it below.