Another Wrong Lennon

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With the groaning over Nowhere Boy having settled down for the time being, there's room to complain about the next John Lennon film -- a BBC Four production called Naked Lennon, in which Christopher Eccleston (Amelia) will play Lennon from 1967 to '71, or when the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein died, the group started to break up, Lennon left his wife Cynthia for Yoko Ono and so on.

John Lennon around '70; Christopher Eccleston. (Pic stolen from Slashfilm.)

The good thing about Eccleston is that unlike Nowhere Boy's Aaron Johnson he has a well-shaped Lennon nose -- longish, pronounced. The bad thing is that during Naked Lennon's storyline Lennon was 27 to 31 years old -- lean, healthy, youngish looking -- and Eccleston is 45 years old (with his 46th birthday just around the corner in February). And with the onset of middle age Eccleston, who would been age-appropriate for this role in the mid '90s, has become large framed and a bit beefy looking. He's also just shy of 6' 2" while Lennon was 5' 10".

So basically a guy who's two or three years away from pushing 50 and is exceptionally tall and large-boned will be playing a slender, almost-four-inches-shorter guy in his mid to late 20s for the most part.

Why oh why do casting directors working on Lennon biopics insist time and again on choosing actors whose faces and frames make it not just difficult but impossible to suspend disbelief? The only decent lookalike and talkalike Lennon was Ian Hart in 1991's The Hours and the Times.

Why am I the only person who even notices stuff like this? Does anybody care about age factors any more? Faye Dunaway was just about 40 when she played the similar-aged Joan Crawford in the early portions of Mommie Dearest. If she had been 55 or 57 she would've been too old --- period. The film's director Frank Perry would have surely realized and accepted that. Anyone with a brain would've known that. Why don't the BBC Four people know that?

There's one other upside element. The Naked Lennon people have actually chosen a guy who faintly resembles Paul McCartney -- British actor Andrew Scott -- to play Paul McCartney. Imagine! In the wake of Sam Taylor Wood's casting Thomas Sangster as McCartney in Nowhere Boy -- surely one of the most ludicrous casting calls in movie history -- Scott seems a welcome relief.