There’s a new Fab Four in town: Harris, Paul, Joseph and Barry. With the core cast of Sam Mendes’s forthcoming quartet of Beatles biopics confirmed, a whole new slew of questions come into focus. Such as when did John Lennon get so tall? How did Paul McCartney get so buff? Is George Harrison really going to be portrayed as a soulful skinhead?
From casting details to when the film will be released, here’s everything you need to know about the four films.
The Fab Four: Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison – PA
Who’s in the cast?
It’s not just the Fab Four themselves – who will be played by Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr) and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison) – who will have key roles in the film.
Paul McCartney, Paul Mescal, Linda McCartney and Saoirse Ronan
Rumours of which actresses will play the band members’ love interests have also emerged. Deadline reports that Irish actress Saoirse Ronan will be the Linda to Mescal’s Paul; their close personal friendship, and the fact they’ve worked together before (on the 2023 thriller Foe) suggests their chemistry should be off the charts. The other rumoured actresses in the line-up include White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood (as Pattie Harrison, née Boyd), Anna Sawai (Yoko Ono) and Mia McKenna-Bruce (Maureen Starkey).
George Harrison, Joseph Quinn, Pattie Boyd and Aimee Lou Wood
Wood’s juicy role as Pattie Harrison will involve a love triangle with Eric Clapton. Ronan’s role opposite Mescal (a Carlow woman opposite a Kildare man playing the ultimate 1960s Anglo-American power couple) is arguably a departure for her, with her filmography tending towards the worthy and Oscar-adjacent rather than the purely popcorn. Her biggest musical moment to date was starring in the video for Ed Sheeran’s earworm Galway Girl – so the only way is up.
John Lennon, Harris Dickinson, Yoko Ono and Anna Sawai
The key role of Yoko Ono – artist, muse and, according to a certain corner of The Beatles fandom, destroyer of the band – is believed to be headed to New Zealand-Japanese actor Anna Sawai – though she dismissed the reports earlier this year as “just a rumour”. Her most acclaimed part was in the Disney+ remake of James Clavell’s Shōgun, which won her an Emmy award.
Then there is Maureen Starkey, the Liverpool hairdresser who was thrust into the spotlight as the first wife of Ringo Starr. She is reportedly to be portrayed by Mia McKenna-Bruce, breakout star of the acclaimed coming-of-age hit How To Have Sex and Chris Chibnall’s upcoming Agatha Christie adaptation, The Seven Dials Mystery, where she will feature opposite Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman. Going by a recent TikTok post, her favourite band begins with a “B” – though it is punk-poppers Blink182 rather than the exalted Beatles.
Ringo Starr, Barry Keoghan, Maureen Starkey and Mia McKenna-Bruce
Given The Beatles’ status at the white-hot centre of 1960s pop culture in swinging London, expect cameos for actors playing Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards and every other British pop icon of the era, with potential walk-on roles for the late Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. There is not much scope for diversity casting but look out for cameos for actors playing the Maharishi, Billy Preston and perhaps Jimi Hendrix.
Who’s directing?
All four films will be directed by Sam Mendes. Having overseen a brace of Bonds (the excellent Skyfall and the rather more forgettable Spectre) he will know a few things about the careful handling of treasured cultural heirlooms.
Weirdly, he doesn’t seem to be the biggest Beatles fan in history – asked to name his five favourite tunes of all time by a US radio station, he listed tracks by Bob Dylan, The Only Ones, Van Morrison, Rufus Wainwright and Lloyd Coyle and the Commotions. But who knows – maybe the lack of reverence will be a plus, allowing him to cast a steely eye over the rise and fall of the band.
All four films will be directed by Sam Mendes – Terence Patrick/CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Don’t worry – it isn’t as if he actively dislikes the group. “The Beatles changed my understanding of music,” he said earlier this year. “I’ve been trying to make a movie about them for years.” He continued: “There had to be a way to tell the epic story for a new generation. I can assure you there is still plenty left to explore and I think we found a way to do that”.
Who is writing the scripts?
Forget a Fab Four. For his Beatles project, Mendes has assembled the power-trio of Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan, and Jack Thorne – though the films are shrouded in secrecy (people believe that each scriptwriter could be assigned one film and one person). Playwright Butterworth is perhaps the most acclaimed of the triumvirate, with his 2009 play Jerusalem fêted as one of the greatest British stage accomplishments of the 21st century. But he did go on to oversee the appalling Celts vs Romans Sky caper Britannia, so he’s a long way from perfect.
Controversially – at least where The Beatles are concerned – Butterworth’s favourite band is their long-time nemeses The Rolling Stones. “The album I played more than any other album in my life – and I have lived my entire life to music – would be Exile,” he said, referring to the Stones’ 1972 masterpiece, Exile on Main Street.
Straughan recently bagged the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for his papal thriller Conclave. On the small screen, he worked on the BBC’s version of Hilary Mantell’s Henry VIII trilogy, and so will know a lot about big egos jousting for prominence.
Then there is Thorne, who achieved overnight acclaim as the writer of Netflix’s toxic masculinity drama Adolescence and is the guiding force behind the recent ITV phone-hacking drama, The Hack. Growing up as a teenager in the 1990s, it is perhaps unsurprising that Thorne hasn’t spoken much about his love of The Beatles. Appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2021, he didn’t give Macca and the gang a look-in, and instead waxed lyrical about Pulp’s Common People and John Williams’s E.T. theme.
When will the films be released?
“All four will come out in April 2028,” according to Mendes, who dubbed the £400m project the most “bingeable moment in cinema”. If he is true to his promise, it truly could be something to twist and shout about.
What era will the films be set in?
We know that Mendes plans to make four intersecting biopics, focusing on each of The Beatles in turn. What would be astounding is if each film was made in a different style tailored to its subject: arty cinéma vérité for Lennon, sumptuous historical biopic for McCartney, mystic surrealism for Harrison and a kid’s cartoon for Starr. But let’s face it, we are talking about former theatre director and James Bond film-maker Mendes here, not some acolyte of David Lynch.
The ages of the cast members might imply a drama of the last days of The Beatles. Both Dickinson and Mescal are 29, close to the ages Lennon and McCartney were during the recording of Abbey Road in 1969, their final sessions together (although Let It Be was released in 1970, after the split). It represented a last coming together, a moment when this once seamless unit were able to put aside rising personal tensions to create a final masterpiece.
The Beatles in 1967 after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – Jeff Hochberg/Getty
It is an album with a glorious conclusion as the still-fabulous four harmonise on The End and could conceivably provide a sentimental setting for a tale that doesn’t otherwise have a particularly happy ending. But there are just too many historic moments in The Beatles’ decade-long odyssey for Mendes to restrict himself to one album. Besides, he has four films to make (potentially eight hours or more of viewing).
Although Peter Jackson’s epic Disney+ documentary series, Get Back, demonstrated a still voracious appetite to consume hours of Beatles footage, I’m not sure there is a mass blockbuster cinema audience ready to settle down to a drama set in an airless studio recording 21 takes of McCartney’s music hall pastiche Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, a song the rest of The Beatles hated.
It is more likely that the films will follow a fairly standard biopic narrative covering the years from 1960 (when The Beatles first went to Hamburg), perhaps in a tale set at the end of the Sixties peppered with flashbacks. Though I’m not convinced the finest special effects could de-age Dickinson and Mescal to the first fateful meeting at St Peter’s Church in Woolton, Liverpool on July 6, 1957, when John was 16 and Paul was 15.
Potentially, each of the four characters could lead us through consecutive stages of The Beatles journey, but this too seems unlikely since screenwriter Peter Straughan suggested the film quartet would involve “certain famous scenes from their lives” told from different points of view, citing Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 unreliable narrator masterpiece Rashomon’s approach to refracting incidents through each character’s perspectives.
The Beatles performing at Shea Stadium, New York, in 1965 – AP
Any Beatles story surely has to cover the explosive Liverpool Cavern concerts and first encounter with manager Brian Epstein (1961), the early recording sessions and explosion of Beatlemania (1962-64), the final American stadium tour with Lennon under threat of assassination (1966), the psychedelic happenings of Sgt Pepper and All You Need Is Love (1967), the Maharishi madness and death of Epstein (1967-68) and the arrival of Yoko Ono presaging the bitter breakup (1969-1970). We could potentially have a Marvel-style crossover with Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan introducing The Beatles to marijuana in 1964.
Will the actors do their own singing and playing?
The answer to that has to be yeah, yeah, yeah. When Ringo let it slip last year that Barry Keoghan had been cast, he said “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons” then jokingly added (in a reference to his own individualistic and untrained style) “I hope not too many”.
Recent biopics of Amy Winehouse (Back to Black) and Dylan (A Complete Unknown) have made a great big song and dance about their stars’ musical prowess. Surely some confluence of vocal register must have been part of the casting process, whilst countless Beatles tribute bands demonstrate that even the most extraordinary musicianship is relatively easy to imitate (rather than innovate). As long as you have a similar vocal range and can hold a tune, you can learn to impersonate another singer, with Lennon’s nasality being a highly distinctive feature.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney in Greece, 1967 – Getty
McCartney would present a challenge for almost any vocalist though. In his prime, he commanded one of the widest ranges ever heard in popular music, spanning five octaves and all of it carrying weight and tone. Luckily, we know Mescal can sing – one of his other future projects includes a role in Richard Linklater’s film musical Merrily We Roll Along.
Are the surviving Beatles involved?
Sort of. The movies have the approval of The Beatles’ Apple Corps, meaning that Mendes has full access to their musical catalogue. However, it is unlikely that surviving band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will be directly involved. McCartney is rumoured to be planning a new album for 2026 with an accompanying tour. Starr has been on the road in 2025.
What is the source material?
You could probably fill the Albert Hall with writings on the subjects of The Beatles. There must have been thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of magazine articles, hundreds of films and documentaries and potentially millions of related articles and interviews about the band at the epicentre of one of the most thoroughly documented cultural moments in modern history.
The Beatles Bible website offers a day-to-day account of their activities from birth to the present. There are intricate tomes citing every minute detail of every recording session. Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn’s immense 1,782 page, 780,000 word masterpiece Tune In only covers the story up to the year 1962, with plans for two more heavyweight volumes to tackle the rest. Which makes Mendes’s potential eight-hour screen time seem positively succinct.
How honest will it be?
Anyone expecting a searing no-holds-barred account of The Beatles’ rise and disintegration is bound to be disappointed. Mendes is a strong storyteller who won’t shy from interpersonal conflict, but as an officially endorsed biopic there is no chance it will do anything that might damage The Beatles brand. Particularly given that the most fiercely honest Beatle is not around to influence proceedings. In later interviews, Lennon frequently compared life in The Beatles to Frederico Fellini’s transgressive orgiastic Roman epic Satyricon.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York, 1980 – Getty
“I was an emperor. I had millions of chicks, drinks, drugs, power and everybody saying how great I was,” he asserted, whilst describing how unhappy this had ultimately made him. “Just think of Satyricon with four musicians going through it.”
I doubt Mendes will be using Fellini as a filmic role model. The films will surely have to hint at the sex, drugs and rock and roll behind the scenes to avoid accusations of sanitisation, but it is safe to assume the underlying message will ally itself with Ringo’s frequent assertion that the story of The Beatles is all about “four guys that loved each other.”