{"id":803497,"date":"2026-10-15T15:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T15:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/803497\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T15:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T15:14:09","slug":"dont-do-this-why-paul-mccartney-cares-about-looking-shorter-than-john-lennon-in-sam-mendes-beatles-films-the-beatles-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/803497\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Don\u2019t do this!\u2019 Why Paul McCartney cares about looking shorter than John Lennon in Sam Mendes\u2019 Beatles films | The Beatles films"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes\u2019s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Some of this is logical (will people really turn out to see four near-identical films on the same day?), some creative (what animal did they have to shave to make John Lennon\u2019s Abbey Road beard?). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band\u2019s actual hairdresser<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly quiet about the whole thing. Last year Ringo Starr mentioned that he\u2019d sat down with Mendes to rework a scene he wasn\u2019t happy with, and Paul McCartney<\/a> has praised the guitar playing of Paul Mescal, but it appeared that no real red lines had been crossed. Until now.<\/p>\n

On the most recent episode of Amy Poehler\u2019s podcast, McCartney hinted at one underlying tension that might just rip the whole project apart: under no circumstances should he be seen to be shorter than John Lennon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A line has been crossed \u2026 Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney. Photograph: Chiabella James\/\u00a92026 CTMG, Inc., All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n

Informing Poehler that he, Lennon and George Harrison<\/a> were all roughly equal height \u2013 with Starr slightly smaller \u2013 McCartney revealed that he was moved to text Mendes after shots of the actors recreating the Abbey Road album cover were published. In them, it looked an awful lot like Harris Dickinson (playing Lennon) loomed above Mescal\u2019s McCartney. As per McCartney\u2019s retelling, the text read \u201cSam! Smaller? Don\u2019t do this! You said you wouldn\u2019t do it!\u201d<\/p>\n

While he was quick to point out that Mendes\u2019s reply assured him that this was simply down to their respective strides in the shot, even going as far as sending another one that showed them both equally tall, you can understand his dismay here. By his own admission, McCartney is still sore about 2009\u2019s Nowhere Boy, which depicted him as Lennon\u2019s slighter and weedier sidekick.<\/p>\n

But this has always persisted. In the 1960s, the official and now genuinely bewildering Beatles cartoon series<\/a> similarly depicted McCartney as a relative pixie compared with the strapping Lennon and, even though the Yellow Submarine film fastidiously kept Lennon and McCartney at the same height, there\u2019s still a perception that McCartney was the smaller half of the partnership.<\/p>\n

In a sense, you can feel his pain. McCartney is a man who has spent the last couple of decades fastidiously building a counterargument to the once-prevalent claim that he was simply the sappy hanger-on to Lennon\u2019s towering genius. Remember in 2002, when he released the live album Back in the US and changed the credits of 19 of its songs from \u201cLennon-McCartney\u201d to \u201cPaul McCartney and John Lennon\u201d to better show the world that he had been in the driving seat?<\/p>\n

Looming \u2026 Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. Photograph: Chiabella James\/\u00a92026 CTMG, Inc., All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n

This ended up with threats of legal action from Yoko Ono and subsequent editions were released with the credits reverted. But McCartney was more successful recently with both Peter Jackson\u2019s Get Back (which recontextualised the Let It Be film from \u201cPaul McCartney irritates everyone into leaving the Beatles\u201d to \u201cPaul McCartney singlehandedly keeps the Beatles afloat\u201d) and the Now and Then single (which had been vetoed by Harrison on the basis that it was \u201cfucking rubbish\u201d and then released anyway after his death). Slowly but surely, McCartney has won the war. His undoubted talent is now recognised at every turn, to the point where you have to do some searching to find any recent interview that doesn\u2019t end with the interviewer tearily thanking McCartney for his genius.\n <\/p>\n

So physical height is the final hurdle. Making sure that Harris Dickinson never looks taller than Paul Mescal<\/a> is the last T that McCartney has to cross to secure his legacy for ever. And, sure, it might seem a little petty \u2013 it is the biopic equivalent of the contracts in the Fast and Furious films that stipulate The Rock must never be seen to lose a fight, even if that means inventing a bizarre contrivance to render it a draw \u2013 but this is important.<\/p>\n

If these films do as well as they\u2019re likely to, then these four actors, with their weird wigs and pubey faces, may well become a generation\u2019s lasting depictions of the band. The slightest inaccuracy could rewrite all of history as we know it. Nobody, especially the man himself, wants Paul McCartney\u2019s gravestone inscription to be \u201cComposer and musician (slightly shorter than John Lennon)\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes\u2019s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Some of this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":803498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-803497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/803498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}