It’s official: Saoirse Ronan, Anna Sawai, Aimee Lou Wood and Mia McKenna-Bruce has joined the cast of “The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event,” starring Linda McCartney, Yoko Ono, Pattie Boyd and Maureen Starkey, who each married a member of the Fab Four at the height of the band’s fame and success in the 1960s.
While Amount previous is confirmed the actor were set to appear in the ambitious project from director Sam Mendes, with their deal closing this week, prompting Sony Pictures to make the formal casting announcement.
“Maureen, Linda, Yoko and Pattie are four fascinating and unique figures in their own right – and I’m proud that we’ve managed to persuade four of the most talented women working in film today to join this amazing adventure,” Mendes said in a statement.
The four films each follow a member of the Beatles – John Lennon (Harris Dickenson), Paul McCartney (Paul Mescal), George Harrison (Joseph Quinn) and Ringo Starr (Barry Keoghan) – as they climb from unknowns from Liverpool in the early 1960s to the biggest band in the world before their first break-up in the late 1970s. has provided music and life rights to a theatrical feature film about them.
Linda (née Eastman) met McCartney in 1967 when she was working as a photographer. They married in 1969; after the Beatles broke up, she was a member of McCartney’s band Wings. They remained together until her death from breast cancer in 1998.
Ono and Lennon first met in 1966 when the latter took the former’s conceptual art into a London gallery. Lennon was still married to Cynthia Powell at the time (a role that has yet to be cast), but they divorced in 1968, and Lennon and Ono married the next year.
Boyd was working as a model when she met Harrison on the set of the Beatles’ 1964 film “A Hard Day’s Night.” They married in 1966 and then divorced in 1977. (She was later married to Eric Clapton from 1979 to 1989.) In an Oct. 10 post on X (since removed), Boyd said she “looks forward (hopes) to meeting ‘Wood’ sometime in the future.”
Starkey (née Cox) began dating Starr (whose real name is Richard Starkey) in 1962, when she was 16 and working as a hairdresser. They married in 1965, and they had three children together; they divorced in 1975. She died of leukemia in 1994.
Ronan, a four-time Oscar nominee, will next be seen in the dark comedy “Bad Apples.” Sawai recently won an Emmy for her performance in the FX series “Shogun,” and she will next appear in Season 2 of the Apple TV series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.” Wood first appeared in the Netflix series “Sex Education” and was nominated for an Emmy this year for her performance in Season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus.” And McKenna-Bruce won the BAFTA rising star award and the British Independent Film Award for her breakout role in 2023’s “How to Have Sex”; she will star opposite Natalie Dormer in the British mini-series “The Lady”.
Ronan is represented by CAA. Sawai is repped by WME, 42, United Agents and Chris Abramson. Wood is repped by CAA, Independent and Sloane, Offer, Weber, Dern. McKenna-Bruce is repped by UTA, 42, Luber Roklin and Jackoway Austen.
