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Jane Asher’s love story with Paul McCartney is set to play out on screen in the forthcoming Beatles biopics – however, the actor won’t be queuing up to see it in cinemas.
Asher, 80, has revealed in a new interview that she has no plans to watch Lucy Boynton’s portrayal of her in Sam Mendes’s four films about the Beatles.
The Bafta nominee began dating McCartney in 1963, with the pair’s romance inspiring numerous songs for the group, including “And I Love Her” and “I’m Looking Through You”. They announced their engagement in 1967 but called it off a year later amid rumours of McCartney’s infidelity.
In Mendes’s forthcoming series The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event, which is due for release in 2028, McCartney is being played by Hamnet’s Paul Mescal, while Bohemian Rhapsody’s Lucy Boynton is portraying Asher.
In a new interview, Asher said that the filmmakers “approached me about it, of course, but I said my usual”, referring to how she no longer speaks about her relationship with McCartney.
When asked how she felt about Boynton playing her, she told The Telegraph: “Well, of course, Lucy is beautiful. But I won’t watch the films, otherwise everyone will ask me what I thought.”
She also said that she “decided years ago” that she would no longer answer questions about her engagement to McCartney, adding: “People would offer me money to talk about it, all sorts of things. But I won’t discuss it. It was so long ago.”
Asher went on to marry illustrator Gerald Scarfe in 1981, with the couple welcoming three children. Meanwhile, McCartney married three times after Asher: first to Linda McCartney in 1969 before her death in 1998, then to Heather Mills for six years in 2002 and finally to now-wife Nancy Shevell in 2011.
Asher, who went on to appear in Death at a Funeral, New Tricks and Holby City, spoke in 2024 about the impact her relationship with McCartney had on her life.
She admitted that she became very quiet and lost her sense of self during her romance with the singer, telling The Guardian: “I became very wary of the press early on, and I decided to keep my private life as private as I possibly could, which was hard because my life was so publicised at that time.”
The forthcoming Beatles biopics will also star Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, while Saoirse Ronan, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Anna Sawai and Aimee Lou Wood will portray Linda McCartney, Maureen Starkey, Yoko Ono and Pattie Boyd, respectively.
