It’s official: Saoirse Ronan, Anna Sawai, Aimee Lou Wood and Mia McKenna-Bruce have joined the cast of “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event,” playing, respectively, Linda McCartney, Yoko Ono, Pattie Boyd and Maureen Starkey, who each married one member of the Fab Four at the height of the band’s fame and success in the 1960s.
While Variety previously confirmed the actors would appear in the ambitious project from director Sam Mendes, their deals all closed this week, leading Sony Pictures to make the formal announcement of their casting.
“Maureen, Linda, Yoko and Pattie are four fascinating and unique figures in their own right — and I’m thrilled that we’ve managed to persuade four of the most talented women working in film today to join this amazing adventure,” Mendes said in a statement.
The four movies will each take the perspective of one member of the Beatles — John Lennon (Harris Dickenson), Paul McCartney (Paul Mescal), George Harrison (Joseph Quinn) and Ringo Starr (Barry Keoghan) — as they climb from unknowns from Liverpool in the early 1960s to the biggest band in the world before their breakup in 1970. Its the first time that the band and their descendants have given music and life rights to a theatrical feature film about them.
Linda (née Eastman) met McCartney in 1967 while working as a photographer. They married in 1969; after the Beatles broke up, she was a member of McCartney’s band, Wings. They remained together until her death from breast cancer in 1998.
Ono and Lennon first met in 1966 when the latter took in the former’s conceptual art at a London gallery. Lennon was still married to Cynthia Powell at the time (a role that has not yet been cast), but they divorced in 1968, and Lennon and Ono married the next year.
Boyd was working as a model when she met Harrison on the set of the Beatles’ 1964 film “A Hard Day’s Night.” They married in 1966, then divorced in 1977. (She later was married to Eric Clapton from 1979 to 1989.) In an Oct. 10 post on X (since deleted), Boyd said she was “looking forward (hoping) to meet” Wood “at some point in the future.”
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Starkey (née Cox) began dating Starr (whose real name is Richard Starkey) in 1962, when she was 16 and working as a hairdresser. They married in 1965, and they had three children together; they divorced in 1975. She died from leukemia in 1994.
Ronan, a four-time Oscar nominee, will next be seen in the dark comedy “Bad Apples.” Sawai recently won an Emmy for her performance in the FX series “Shogun,” and she’ll next appear on Season 2 of the Apple TV series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.” Wood first rose to prominence on the Netflix series “Sex Education,” and was nominated for an Emmy this year for her performance on Season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus.” And McKenna-Bruce won the BAFTA rising star award and British Independent Film Award for her breakout role in 2023’s “How to Have Sex”; she’s set to star opposite Natalie Dormer in the British miniseries “The Lady.”
Ronan is repped by CAA. Sawai is repped by WME, 42, United Agents and Chris Abramson. Wood is repped by CAA, Independent and Sloane, Offer, Weber, Dern. McKenna-Bruce is represented by UTA, 42, Luber Roklin and Jackoway Austen.
From Variety US