We’re not losing too much sleep over the fact that famed Liverpudlian Paul McCartney is being played by an Irish-born actor, Paul Mescal, in Sam Mendes’ four upcoming Beatles movies about the Fab Four, but now yet another famed Irish actor is portraying Paul’s wife, Linda McCartney: Saoirse Ronan.
Ronan would portray Linda McCartney, née the American photographer and musician Linda Eastman who died of cancer in 1998. Though there’s been some other casting rumors floating around, like Aimee Lou Wood maybe playing George Harrison’s wife Patti, nothing else has been locked down to date beyond the main group of mop tops. They include Mescal as Paul, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan (also an Irish actor) playing Ringo Starr.
With Ronan acting alongside Mescal, we’re getting the 2023 “Foe” reunion that we didn’t know we needed. And you would think that with a star on Ronan’s level, the Linda McCartney/Eastman part is at least somewhat sizable in the four films each dedicated to an individual Beatle, or at the very least Paul’s entry.
Eastman met McCartney in 1967 while on a photo assignment in London and again shortly after at a launch party for the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. They got married in 1969, and shortly after the breakup of The Beatles, she began recording music with Paul as part of Wings and for McCartney’s solo record “Ram.”
It’s unclear exactly how much, if any, of the Beatles post-breakup careers will be explored in the films, but Linda was a prominent feature of the recent “Man on the Run” documentary about Paul’s post-Beatles career, a doc that premiered at Telluride and Amazon MGM picked up for release.
Mendes’ Beatles movies are a gigantic swing for Sony. Each movie will focus on a different Beatle’s perspective, and the plan is to shoot the films simultaneously over the course of an entire year. Then, Sony plans to release all four movies the same month in April 2028. The studio is betting on dominating cinemas for a massive theatrical event that month, and while Mendes revealed there is an order in which he wants you to see those four films, it’s unclear just yet what that order is.
Ronan most recently starred in “Bad Apples” at TIFF, a black comedy for which we wrote Ronan shows a side of herself we’ve never seen before. The film is still seeking distribution.