Paul McCartney's One Casting Note for the Beatles Biopic: Height

Sam Mendes' upcoming Beatles biopic will take audiences back to Abbey Road, and Paul McCartney has a note about the casting. He said he was concerned that Paul Mescal looks “markedly shorter” than his co-stars, Deadline reports, and that he even reached out to Mendes about it — though he doesn't know how the director is addressing it. It is a very specific worry, and a revealing one: a band is a set of silhouettes as much as it is a set of voices, and the four Beatles' proportions are part of an image fixed in memory. Not every director treats a lineup as a composition. McCartney apparently does.