Paul McCartney complains biopics make him shorter than Lennon — the tape measure is on his side

Paul McCartney went on Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast this week and revealed his one standing grievance with every Beatles movie ever made: the actors playing him keep being shorter than the actors playing John Lennon. Per Billboard, he traced the pattern back to 2009's Nowhere Boy, where Thomas Brodie-Sangster's teen Paul comes off, in McCartney's telling, as a wimpy little figure whom Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Lennon knocks to the floor.

Then it happened again, in the project he personally approved. Sam Mendes' The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event, one film per Beatle, all four releasing in April 2028, cast Paul Mescal as McCartney and Harris Dickinson as Lennon. McCartney did the math out loud:

"He's smaller than the guy who plays John."

— Paul McCartney, on the Good Hang podcast

By his account, he texted Mendes directly, telling him not to do this. Mendes' response was to send over a still of the recreated Abbey Road crossing — in which, McCartney protested, the Paul character looked markedly smaller — then reassure him it was just the stride pattern mid-step, and follow up with a second photo where the two stood level. Poehler twisted the knife with the obvious problem: the one Beatle who crossed Abbey Road barefoot can't exactly be slipped lifts.

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What the tape measure says

McCartney's claim on the podcast was that all the Beatles were the same height, with Ringo a bit smaller. The record mostly backs him:

• The real Beatles: McCartney's peak height is logged at around 5'10", with Lennon and Harrison within half an inch either way — close enough that who looks tallest in any photo depends on footwear and posture. Nobody disputes Ringo, at about 5'6", as the short one.
• The movie Beatles: Mescal is listed at 5'11". Dickinson, per Billboard, stands 6'2".
• The result: a real-life gap of roughly zero becomes an on-screen gap of about three inches — in the wrong direction.

So this isn't a rock star inventing an insecurity. It's the rare celebrity complaint that survives fact-checking: two films, seventeen years apart, both shrinking the same Beatle, both contradicted by the measurements.

Lennon and McCartney were the same height for forty years of photographs. The movies keep finding three inches between them.

The context that makes it funny

Remember, McCartney has signed off on this project at every stage. Mendes got the full blessing of the surviving Beatles and both estates — a first — for four interlocking films, with Joseph Quinn as George and Barry Keoghan as Ringo, and producer Pippa Harris confirmed at the London Film Festival that all four arrive at the same time. Sony cleared an entire month of 2028 for what it's treating as a binge-watch event in theaters.

Which means the man gave Hollywood unprecedented access to his life's story, his songs, and his band's likenesses, and the single note he's gone public with is vertical. He says he's warned Mendes about his height hang-up and has no idea how the director plans to solve it. There are eighteen months left to figure out the camera angles.

Previously we wrote: Joe Russo calls Tom Holland the last great movie star — and hasn't cast him in Avengers: Doomsday