The official casting on Sam Mendes’ ridiculously ambitious (and, if we can all be frank here, ridiculously titled) The Beatles—A Four Film Cinematic Event has suddenly just doubled, as Variety reports that Sony has finalized casting for the wives of each of the Fab Four during the periods the films cover. Specifically, that means Saoirse Ronan has been cast as Linda McCartney, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd, and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey.
Which means, among other things, that Mendes isn’t skimping on star power when it comes to spouses: Ronan has more Oscar nominations to her name than the rest of the cast put together, Sawai and Wood are both fresh off highly celebrated seasons of TV (specifically Shōgun and The White Lotus, respectively), and McKenna-Bruce won a BAFTA Rising Star Award for her 2023 film How To Have Sex. The four of them will be paired up, in turn, with Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. So, yeah: Pretty stacked bill.
All four women married their particular members of the Beatles at some point during the 1960s, i.e., after they had begun their transformations from a bunch of floppy-haired weirdos from Liverpool into internationally recognized musical gods. (Interestingly, the big casting drop today does not mention who’ll be playing Cynthia Powell/Lennon, who was married to Lennon from 1962 to 1968, was the only one of the Beatles spouses to have known her future husband before he became one of the most famous people on the planet, and was the mother of Lennon’s son Julian, who was recently noted to be being at least nominally consulted on Mendes’ movies.)
Of course, we’re still a very long way from the four fab films actually arriving in theaters: All four movies are currently slated to hit theaters in April of 2028.
