Beatles Biopics Cast Wives, Ariana Joins ‘Horror Story’

Paul and Linda McCartney performing with Wings in London in 1976 (photo: Wood / Evening Standard / Getty Images / Hulton Archive).

The upcoming Beatles biopics have rounded out four important members of their casts. Saoirse Ronan, Anna Sawai, Aimee Lou Wood and Mia McKenna-Bruce will each portray one of the Fab Four’s spouses in The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event, which will be released by Sony Pictures in April 2028.

Ronan will star as Paul McCartney’s first wife Linda Eastman, Sawai as John Lennon’s second wife Yoko Ono, Wood as George Harrison’s first wife Pattie Boyd and McKenna-Bruce as Ringo Starr’s first wife Maureen Starkey. Harris Dickenson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan were previously cast as Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr.

“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,” says director Sam Mendes.

Each of the four films centers around one of the Beatles from their pre-fame days in early 1960s Liverpool through their unceremonious 1970 breakup, during which their spouses played key roles in shaping their lives and music.

McCartney and Eastman met in 1967 while the latter was working as a rock photographer. After the Beatles’ split, McCartney drafted Eastman, a novice musician, to join his band Wings, and they were married until Eastman’s cancer-related death in 1998. Ono and Lennon met in 1966 when he was still married to his first wife, Cynthia; they divorced in 1968, and Lennon and Ono were wed the following year. They remained together until Lennon’s 1980 murder; Ono is now 92 and still lives in the couple’s New York apartment.

Harrison and Boyd met on the set of the 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night and married two years later. They divorced in 1977 after Boyd had an affair with Harrison’s best friend Eric Clapton, to whom she was married from 1979-89. Starkey and Starr started dating in 1962 when she was a 16-year-old hairdresser in Liverpool. They were married from 1965-75 and their three children include Zak Starkey, who has drummed for the Who and Oasis. Maureen Starkey passed away in 1994 after battling leukemia.

In related news, Ariana Grande will be part of the cast for the 13th season of American Horror Story, which will be out sometime next year. She joins Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Gabourey Sidibe, Leslie Grossman, and Jessica Lange in the long-running, Ryan Murphy-led series. Grande previously appeared in Murphy’s 2014 TV series Scream Queens.