Whether it was the incident where he gathered the rest of the group to tell them, with a straight face, that he was Jesus, or the in-bed protest against war, or the fact that he was gunned down by an assassin aged just 40 years old, but John Lennon has always been the most interesting Beatle*.
And now, to prove it, he’s about to get his own biopic, to be directed by British artist and film director, Sam Taylor-Wood.
Nowhere Boy (you see, it’s clever, because Lennon wrote Nowhere Man) will tell the story of Lennon’s early life, from his interesting relationship with his estranged mother, Julia, who entrusted his care to her sister, Mary, to his burgeoning interest in art and music, which gained further focus when he was introduced to a young man named Paul McCartney.
The movie will stay with Lennon through the early days of the Beatles, when he first became an icon, which means that there’s plenty of scope for further movies, including all three of the incidents outlined in the opening paragraph, not to mention his marriage to Yoko Ono.
We’ve been here before, to an extent, most notably with 1994’s Backbeat, which saw Ian Hart play an excellent Lennon (for the second time – he first played Lennon in The Hours And Times). But that was mainly about the story of former Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, so it’ll be interesting to see a biopic about the man who, for many, was the driving force of The Beatles during their rise to superstardom.
Casting is currently underway for the film, which will be written by Control scribe, Matt Greenhalgh. Empire has no clue who might make a good Lennon (Hart’s too old, sadly, for a third crack), but it’s going to be one hell of a role for the lucky actor. Get practicing that Scouse accent now, la.
Which isn’t to do a disservice to Macca (there’s the marijuana bust, for one thing; the recent travails with Heather Mills, for another; the bloody Frog Chorus, for yet another), George (he, erm, liked Monty Python) and Ringo (erm…), of course. Ahem.