Sam Mendes’ ambitious four-part Beatles film has confirmed the casting of four main female roles.
Sony Pictures officially announced that Mia McKenna-Bruce will play Maureen Cox, with Saoirse Ronan as Linda Eastman, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono and Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd. All four had been strongly rumoured to have been in line for their parts, but only now has their participation been confirmed.
Each of the four real-life women played significant roles in the Beatles’ story. Cox met drummer Ringo Starr as a 15-year-old trainee hairdresser in 1962, when the band were still regulars at Liverpool’s Cavern club; they married in 1965 but were divorced 10 years later. Eastman was a photographer who met Paul McCartney in 1967; they married in 1969 and she joined his post-Beatles band Wings and performed regularly with him until her death in 1998. Ono, an artist and musician, met John Lennon in 1966; they were married in 1969 after Lennon divorced his first wife, Cynthia, and they remained together until Lennon’s death in 1980. Boyd, a successful fashion model, met George Harrison in 1964 on the set of the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night; they were married in 1966 and divorced in 1977 after she had become the object of attentions from Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton, who co-wrote the 1970 song Layla about her.
In a statement reported by Variety, Mendes said: “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.”
Currently titled The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, Mendes’ project was first announced in 2024 with the aim of making four separate fiction films, one for each member of the band. In April, the band members’ casting was announced – Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Starr and Joseph Quinn as Harrison – and in May reports emerged that award-winning writers Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne had been hired to work on the films.
