You wouldn’t think Paul McCartney – one of the rare individuals for whom that cliché ‘living legend’ doesn’t feel out of place – would ever feel shy about approaching any of his peers.
But there’s one that he, apparently, still feels nervous around.
When asked by Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast who he would most like to collaborate with Macca admitted: “I always think Bob Dylan. But I’m too nervous to ring him up.”
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Poehler joked that he couldn’t exactly see Dylan on the phone, McCartney quipped that he was more likely to be “in some bush, in a sleeping bag, maybe.”
Dylan and McCartney have, of course, met on many occasions – famously, it was Dylan who introduced marijuana to The Beatles in 1964, thus altering the course of their career.
Speaking to BBC Radio Two earlier this year, McCartney describes another meeting backstage at the Desert Trip festival in 2016: “I came in to see him and it was like, ‘Wow.’ It was just him and me in this massive, big tent backstage and he was very complimentary,” he recalled. “It was funny ‘cause… A little bit embarrassing, he said, ‘You’re a star.’ I thought, ‘What do you say to that?’”
In the same Poehler interview, McCartney also revealed he’s a bit upset at the way he’s portrayed in the numerous biopics that have come out in recent years. Primarily because they depict him as shorter than he is.
It started with the 2009 Sam Taylor-Wood-directed Nowhere Boy, which depicted John Lennon during his teenage years. “The John character, he’s bigger than me in the film. My character is kind of wimpy, smaller than John. John knocks me to the floor. It’s like, Sam, this is not true. She said, ‘This is a movie; it’s not a documentary.’ And I thought, Well, I don’t like that explanation. But I couldn’t do anything.”
Now, he claims that Sam Mendes is doing the same thing in his quartet of Beatles biopics, in which Paul Mescal plays McCartney. “And guess what? He’s smaller than the guy who plays John,” he said of Mescal.
It seems Macca contacted Mendes about this very issue. “I said, ‘Sam, I’ve got just one thing that I need to say to you.’ I don’t know how Sam is going to deal with it. He sent me a picture, a still, from the filming they were doing and they’re crossing the Abbey Road crossing. And the Paul character is markedly smaller.
“I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller! Don’t do this. You said you wouldn’t do it!’ He said, ‘No, it’s okay, it’s just the stride pattern.’”
