Paul McCartney met the actor set to portray him in an upcoming four-film project about the Beatles.
McCartney, 83, and Paul Mescal, 30, were amongst the attendees at the London screening of Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run. The Amazon MGM documentary details McCartney’s life after the Beatles disbanded.
Mescal attended the premiere with girlfriend Gracie Abrams. The pair posed with McCartney on the red carpet.
Mescal will be seen as McCartney in the forthcoming movie series The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event. The set of four films, each focusing on a Beatles member, will release theatrically in April 2028. In addition to Mescal, the films feature Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.
Each segment of the film anthology will be directed by Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, known for critically acclaimed projects like American Beauty and Skyfall. Mendes also produced Hamnet, in which Mescal starred as William Shakespeare.
Other key characters will be played by a starry cast: Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, James Norton as Brian Epstein, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd, Harry Lloyd as George Martin, and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey.
Mescal has spoken about meeting McCartney previously, calling the Grammy-winning artist “extraordinary.”
“He’s an extraordinary man, like to spend any time—it’s a crazy sentence to say that I’ve spent time with that man, let alone play him," the actor told IndieWire in September.
He also told Backstage that the opportunity to play McCartney is “so exciting” and that the cast is approaching the legacy of the Beatles with “the greatest love and respect and rigor.”
“I get to play somebody who I have always admired. You could count on one hand how many people have influenced the world as much as he has,” Mescal said. “His relationship to his art is so inspiring to me.”
