Paul Mescal’s Beatles Role Has McCartney Checking the Heights

Paul Mescal’s turn as Paul McCartney has acquired an unusually particular piece of feedback from the man himself. Speaking on Good Hang with Amy Poehler, McCartney described teasing director Sam Mendes about the actor’s height alongside his fellow screen Beatles — and querying a filming still in which his counterpart appeared noticeably shorter.

The exchange puts Mescal’s casting back in the spotlight, but it is more interesting than a celebrity quibble over inches. McCartney connected it to an earlier film that, in his view, made him look physically diminished beside John Lennon. Our take: the joke is light, but the question underneath it is worth taking seriously. A film can establish a pecking order before anybody speaks.

What happened

Mendes is making four separate Beatles films, with Mescal playing McCartney and Harris Dickinson taking the role of Lennon. Joseph Quinn plays George Harrison, while Barry Keoghan plays Ringo Starr. That ensemble gives the director four individual subjects, rather than making one musician the sole route into the band’s story.

McCartney’s concern was comparative, not a demand for a particular measurement. “He’s smaller than the guy who plays John,” he told Poehler, joking about Mescal. He recalled himself, Lennon and Harrison being the same height, with Starr shorter. That is McCartney’s recollection of the group, rather than a set of independently checked measurements.

According to McCartney, he had already raised the issue with Mendes when the director sent him a still showing the actors recreating the Abbey Road crossing. Mescal appeared smaller in that image, prompting McCartney to get back in touch and challenge what he was seeing.

Mendes’s explanation, as McCartney recounted it, was that the apparent difference resulted from the performers being at different points in their strides. The director then sent another image in which their heights looked equal. It is a useful distinction: a walking figure caught between steps is not a reliable measuring stick.

Nothing about that exchange amounts to McCartney rejecting Mescal’s casting. The objection he described concerned how the group looked together in a particular image. Turning it into a verdict on Mescal’s ability would give a teasing production anecdote considerably more weight than it can carry.

The background

The reason McCartney noticed becomes clearer when he talks about Nowhere Boy. Released in 2009 and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, the film explores Lennon’s adolescent years. Aaron Taylor-Johnson played Lennon; Thomas Brodie-Sangster played McCartney. Its focus was therefore different from Mendes’s four-film approach from the outset.

McCartney told Poehler that he disliked the earlier film’s presentation of his younger self as smaller and weaker beside Lennon. He singled out a scene in which Lennon knocks his character to the floor, disputing its truthfulness. His complaint joined physical appearance to characterisation: being made smaller helped make his screen counterpart seem less formidable.

He also recalled challenging the director, whom he described as remaining a friend. In his account, she defended the freedom of a dramatic film rather than a documentary. McCartney was dissatisfied with that answer, but the film had already been made. His messages to Mendes show him raising a related concern while the new portrayal is taking shape.

Why the distinction matters

A biopic necessarily involves interpretation. Casting, dialogue, the selection of incidents and the amount of time devoted to each person all shape the audience’s understanding. Even a faithfully recreated outfit cannot make an invented private conversation into a historical record. Visual accuracy and factual accuracy overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

Documentaries make choices too, although they work with different material and expectations. Our look at the Oasis documentary’s fan-focused approach offers another way into the question of how bands’ stories reach an audience. With a dramatisation, the additional task is to recognise an actor’s interpretation without mistaking every gesture for evidence about the original person.