John Lennon’s half-sister has said that an actor from Liverpool should play him in the forthcoming Beatles biopics, directed by Sam Mendes.
The official casting was announced last week for the quartet of films, each one based on a different band member and helmed by former Bond filmmaker Mendes. London-born actor Harris Dickinson, star of Babygirl, will play Lennon. He joins Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Paul Mescal and Paul McCartney.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Lennon’s sister Julia Baird weighed in on her late brother’s casting. “Yes, of course” she replied when asked if it should be a scouser playing him. “No one else can get that Liverpool intonation. Nobody”.
John Lennon has been played on film and television many times by a variety of actors. Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston played him in the 2010 TV film Lennon Naked, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson played a young version of the musician in 2009’s Nowhere Boy. Robert Carlyle played an alternate version of Lennon in 2019’s Yesterday, which portrayed a world where the band never existed.
The most notable actor from Liverpool to play him was Ian Hart, who played him twice in the ‘90s and once for 2013 short Snodgrass, which imagined him as an older man who had never joined The Beatles.
On the subject of being consulted about the movie, Baird replied: “[Mendes is] never going to ask me! I’m the last person he would want to talk to because then he can’t make it up”. Later in the interview, she described John Lennon as: “a brilliant older brother, very bossy – a family trait”.
She does, however, regret his fame, given it led to his murder at the hands of fanatic Mark David Chapman in 1980. “To be John’s sister is a privilege that I couldn’t begin to describe to you. But given the choice I wish he’d never seen a guitar”. When asked why, she replied: “Well, then he might have been an art teacher and he’d still be here”.
All four of The Beatles films will premiere in April 2028, in what Mendes describes as the first “bingeable moment in cinema”. Recently, fans online gave their verdict on the casting.
