Anna Sawai will play Yoko Ono in Sam Mendes’ planned four-film Beatles project, a high-stakes attempt to turn one of pop culture’s most documented stories into a theatrical event built around four intersecting viewpoints. Deadline first reported Sawai’s casting as Ono, the artist who became John Lennon’s partner and a frequent target of public hostility during the band’s breakup-era mythology.
Speaking this week while promoting Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Sawai framed the part as a chance to correct what she sees as a flattened public portrait. “People really don’t know the true person that she was,” Sawai said, calling Ono “an incredible artist” and arguing that her independence made her “an easy target.” She added that telling Ono’s story feels “very meaningful” to her.
Mendes’ plan is unusual on scale and release strategy: four separate films, each centered on a different Beatle, scheduled to open on the same day in April 2028. The director has sold the approach as a “bingeable” theatrical experience aimed at pulling audiences back to cinemas, with Sony positioning the package as a month-dominating tentpole rather than a single prestige biopic.
The core cast for the band is set, with Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. Additional key figures from the Beatles’ personal and professional orbit have been filling in around them, including Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey Tigrett.
The project has the cooperation of Apple Corps and the surviving Beatles, alongside approvals tied to Lennon and Harrison’s estates—access that gives Mendes rights to life stories and music, while raising expectations about how contested personalities such as Ono will be portrayed on screen.
