‘Don’t do this!’ Why Paul McCartney cares about looking shorter than John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ Beatles films

You’re Paul McCartney. So how come you’re still getting het up at a fictional version of you being marginally smaller than a fictional version of John Lennon? There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles biopics.

Some of this is logical (will people really turn out to see four near-identical films on the same day? ), some creative (what animal did they have to shave to make John Lennon’s Abbey Road beard? ). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band’s actual hairdresser . But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly…