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Sam Mendes’s quartet of Beatles biopics are the cinematic equivalent of a distant asteroid headed steadily towards Earth. They’re a few years from impact—a 2028 release date is pencilled in—but when they hit, they’ll be big. Legendary playwright Jez Butterworth and Adolescence creator Jack Thorne are among the writers. Mendes, who is directing all four films, each told from the point of view of one of the Fab Four, has full rights to their life stories and the all-important song catalog. And he has a crack team of young stars playing the leads: Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison. What about everyone else in the Beatles Cinematic Universe—the friends, lovers and collaborators? The band’s story has loomed over pop culture from the 1960s to the present; read any Beatles biography, and you’ll see they have Kevin Bacon-like powers of ubiquity. Some of the supporting roles have been confirmed, or almost confirmed. As per reporting from Variety, Saoirse Ronan is playing Linda McCartney, Macca’s first wife; How to Have Sex’s Mia McKenna-Bruce will be Starr’s first wife, Maureen Starkey; while Shogun star Anna Sawai and The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood are “circling” the respective roles of Yoko Ono and Harrison’s first wife, Pattie Boyd. And James Norton, according to Deadline, is our first locked-in actor for all those “fifth Beatles” indispensable to the band’s success: he’s to play Brian Epstein, the band’s manager during their rise to fame until his death by overdose in 1967. That still leaves a lot of famous (sometimes very famous) faces to cast for. Here’s who we think Mendes should be ringing up. Tom Holland as Eric Clapton “I can’t do that. Nobody ever plays on Beatles records,” was Eric Clapton’s first response when George Harrison asked him to play guitar on “While Why Guitar Gently Weeps”. Eventually, he relented, and laid down one of the finest solos in rock music. Who to channel the charisma which eventually helped him woo Boyd away from Harrison, her then husband? Our Mr-Steal-Your-Girl has to be Tom Holland—not only a bit of a ringer for a young Clapton, but a man with enough star wattage to get across just how huge the guitarist was at the time. Harry Melling as Mal Evans Roadie, bodyguard, personal assistant, tea brewer, music producer—Malcolm “Mal” Evans was many things to the Beatles. He was always around doing something, even if only providing a warm, solid presence that reminded the musicians of their origins, given he grew up in Liverpool too, and first heard them play at the Cavern Club. Harry Melling, whose child-actor beginnings as Dudley Dursley in the original Harry Potter films has been followed by assured performances like the co-lead in Pillion, Alexander Skarsgård’s new BDSM romance, should have just the right mix of comedy and vulnerability. Ashton Sanders as Billy Preston The American keyboardist and singer Billy Preston was one of vanishingly few musicians to get a named credit on a Beatles song (“Get Back”, from Let It Be); John Lennon even once proposed that he join the band outright. He was only in his early 20s when he worked with them, so you need someone to channel the semi-naïve brilliance of a young genius. Ashton Sanders, who played the teenage Chiron in Moonlight, as well as Bobby Brown in the 2022 Whitney Houston biopic, could do a fine job. Harry Lawtey as Pete Best One of only two of the “fifth Beatles” who was once an actual Beatle. Pete Best was the band’s first drummer, who played with them during their raucous early run of club shows in Hamburg, before being fired by Epstein (at the request of the other members) due to worries about his musical abilities. His post-Beatles career never took off. Who better to blend swaggering charm— Best was often judged the best-looking of the Beatles while he was in the band—with the whiff of impending tragedy than Harry Lawtey, whose role as Robert Spearing in Industry demonstrates that he can do “bloke trampled underfoot by circumstance”? Cillian Murphy as George Martin The producer who helped the Beatles turn the studio album into something far more elaborate than a simple live recording, George Martin was initially unimpressed with them. Their humour and their commercial success quickly won him over, birthing a partnership heard in all its glory on records like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A slightly chilly genius with deep reserves of warmth beneath the surface? It can only be Cillian Murphy. It’ll be a touch less fraught watching him create Revolver than creating the atomic bomb, at any rate. Bill Skarsgård as Phil Spector Sixties super-producer Phil Spector only had a tangential role in the Beatles story, producing on Lennon and Harrison’s request (and to McCartney’s dissatisfaction) their final album, Let It Be. But his intensity and eccentricity—he later became a recluse and in 2009 was convicted of murdering the actress Lana Clarkson—need to make a mark on screen. Step forward Bill Skarsgård. After playing Pennywise the Clown in It and Count Orlok in Nosferatu, an unhinged record producer should be light work. Benny Safdie as Ed Sullivan Another walk-on role that nevertheless really needs to land. Even those with the sketchiest of Beatles lore tend to know this part of the mythology: that the band’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 ignited Beatlemania in the States. And no one knows how to kick off on-screen hysteria like Benny Safdie, both as director and actor. Channelling the theatricality of an old-timey chat show host is just what we need to see from him. Dev Patel as Ravi Shankar Crucial to the George Harrison film in particular will be Ravi Shankar, the esteemed Indian sitarist who helped teach the Beatle the instrument—Harrison played it on songs like “Norwegian Wood” —and became a lifelong friend and collaborator. You need an actor with both experience and vigor: Shankar was in early middle age and well into his career by the time he entered Harrison’s world. Dev Patel, an assured leading man, has the chance to step into a great support slot with this one. Honor Swinton Byrne as Marianne Faithfull It’s hard to get around the fact that most of the women in the Beatles’ world were there for romantic reasons: 60s rock was socially pioneering in many ways, but gender wasn’t always one of them. An exception is Marianne Faithfull, a singer and actor who was going out with Mick Jagger in this period, but who was good friends with McCartney and who contributed backing vocals on “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need Is Love.” Honor Swinton Byrne is the one to nail her ethereal, hippy-chic vibe. Robert Pattinson as Bob Dylan The Bob Dylan that exists in the Beatles-verse isn’t necessarily the youthful rogue that Timothée Chalamet played in A Complete Unknown. Instead, he’s almost a trickster figure, tempting the band deeper down the rabbit hole of the counterculture: he’s the one who (reportedly) introduced them to weed, and encouraged (or challenged) them to up their lyrical game and get more poetic and introspective. Hollywood’s out-and-proud oddball, Robert Pattinson, is the man for the job. Just imagine him doing the Dylan voice. This story originally appeared in British GQ.
