All of the Beatles Were Supposed to Appear in ‘Yesterday’
If you haven’t seen the Beatles-themed film Yesterday yet, there are SPOILERS ahead, so consider this your warning.
Yesterday director Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis recently appeared on Empire‘s podcast and touched on how all four Beatles were supposed to pop up in the film in random ways.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes shows Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) paying a visit to John Lennon, who was still alive since The Beatles never became the iconic band we all know, thus, was never murdered in 1980. Boyle and Curtis say Jack was originally supposed to have run-ins with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, too.
“When he [Jack] first goes to Liverpool, I’d written a long scene where he just goes to a pub and he bumps into George and Ringo,” said Curtis. “It was, I hope, a sweet scene, and they were just two delightful, oldish men who’d once been in a band together. He bought him a couple of drinks, and it was all very sweet because they were clearly music enthusiasts who had never got any further. Happy people who loved music, like so many of us do, and formed a band or been in a pub band.”
Curtis continued, “At the very end [Jack] was going to move to the Isle of Wight, to a cottage, and you were going to hear outside his window someone saying, ‘Vera, Chuck, Dave!’ There were going to be three dogs, and Paul was going to be walking them.”
Those scenes were cut from the scripts, and Boyle says he never saw them when he eventually became involved with the film. Boyle does comment that the Lennon scene was certainly a turning point in the film’s story saying, “What you wanted to do was just transform Jack’s experience for a moment. It does allow him to right a wrong. We don’t quite have the real power to right the wrong of Lennon’s death, but you do have the power through cinema to imagine it for a moment, that’s all.”
