John, Paul, George and Ringo: meet Harris, Paul, Joseph and Barry. The long-rumoured casting for Sir Sam Mendes’s Beatles biopics has been confirmed. And one reaction crowds out all the others: these blokes look nothing like the Beatles.
And yes, I can obviously see what you mean. Mescal’s going to have to really go some to get that lush 1969 McCartney beard, for sure. But you’re all wrong.
If you’re going to do something as utterly kamikaze as releasing four interwoven films at once, at a time when nobody goes to the cinema anymore, you need people to go: “Harris Dickinson? I know that guy.” You need Paul Mescal to be doing press junkets like billy-o. You need Barry Keoghan popping up on Radio 1 to play Unpopular Opinion with Greg James.
You need, in short, the kind of star wattage that a random man who simply looks a lot like George Harrison cannot give you. I’m more worried that they’re simply too ripped to play Hamburg boys who lived on the cheap upper Preludin and never saw a lat machine in their lives. We’re still a long way out though.
But the more important reason that this casting works is that you’re not just casting for four Liverpudlians who can play some tunes. You’re trying to cast four men who you can believe the entire world would lose their collective shit about. They might not look much like the individual Beatles, but I think they’ve got their individual sauce spot on.
Mescal can do Macca-style bubbly everyman hotness, if you’ll recall that defining shorts-and-a-tinny look; after Babygirl, Dickinson has John’s sly, slightly dangerous streak; Quinn has a dreamy vibe but you can imagine him turning sarcastic like George; and like Ringo, Keoghan is fit in a way that is not cookie-cutter, but we must acknowledge as outrageously powerful given that he went out with Sabrina Carpenter.
And if you’ve seen any TV movie tellings of the Beatles story – I consider myself a connoisseur here – you’ll know that just casting people who look a bit like the Beatles is putting the mystery tour before the magic. It didn’t matter that Joaquin Phoenix looked nowt like Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. It mattered that he looked like an outlaw who was carrying the weight of the world on his skinny shoulders.
That Timothee Chalamet looked a bit like Bob Dylan even before he popped on his suede jacket for A Complete Unknown, and then was also able to get at his mumbling mystique, was the kind of cosmic fluke that doesn’t happen very often in rock biopics. Taron Egerton got Elton John’s splenetic, needy vulnerability in Rocketman while looking nothing like him. Rami Malek and his gigantic false teeth looked a fair bit like Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, and that film stank the place out.
It doesn’t even really matter that they’re not scouse. You saw Mescal do a good Leeds accent in All of Us Strangers. Hopefully Keoghan’s tightened up his slightly wobbly Prescot twang from Saltburn. Look: they’re actors. They’ll act. It’s fine. They’ll do the research. The deeper you go, the higher you fly.
