‘Don’t do this!’ Why Paul McCartney cares about looking shorter than John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ Beatles films

There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes’s 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’s Abbey Road beard?). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band’s actual hairdresser.But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly quiet about the whole thing. Last year Ringo Starr mentioned that he’d sat down with Mendes to rework a scene he wasn’t happy with, and Paul McCartney has praised the guitar playing of Paul Mescal, but it appeared that no real red lines had been crossed. Until now.On the most recent episode of Amy Poehler’s 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 line has been crossed … Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney. Photograph: Chiabella James/©2026 CTMG, Inc., All Rights Reserved.Informing Poehler that he, Lennon and George Harrison were all roughly equal height – with Starr slightly smaller – 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’s McCartney. As per McCartney’s retelling, the text read “Sam! Smaller? Don’t do this! You said you wouldn’t do it!”While he was quick to point out that Mendes’s 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’s Nowhere Boy, which depicted him as Lennon’s slighter and weedier sidekick.But this has always persisted. In the 1960s, the official and now genuinely bewildering Beatles cartoon series 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’s still a perception that McCartney was the smaller half of the partnership.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’s 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 “Lennon-McCartney” to “Paul McCartney and John Lennon” to better show the world that he had been in the driving seat?Looming … Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. Photograph: Chiabella James/©2026 CTMG, Inc., All Rights Reserved.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’s Get Back (which recontextualised the Let It Be film from “Paul McCartney irritates everyone into leaving the Beatles” to “Paul McCartney singlehandedly keeps the Beatles afloat”) and the Now and Then single (which had been vetoed by Harrison on the basis that it was “fucking rubbish” 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’t end with the interviewer tearily thanking McCartney for his genius. So physical height is the final hurdle. Making sure that Harris Dickinson never looks taller than Paul Mescal is the last T that McCartney has to cross to secure his legacy for ever. And, sure, it might seem a little petty – 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 – but this is important.If these films do as well as they’re likely to, then these four actors, with their weird wigs and pubey faces, may well become a generation’s 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’s gravestone inscription to be “Composer and musician (slightly shorter than John Lennon)”.