When Aaron Johnson read the script for Nowhere Boy, he figured three things might stand in the way of **Sam Taylor-Wood’**s picking him to play the adolescent John Lennon: “I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t play guitar, and I couldn’t do a Liverpool accent.” Still in the middle of shooting Kick-Ass, this spring’s box-office hit about teenage superhero fantasists, the eighteen-year-old was so desperate to get the lead in the painful, little-known backstory about the Beatle’s upbringing by his aunt Mimi and his uneasy relationship with his sexy, rock-’n-’roll-loving mother, Julia, that he threw himself into inhabiting Lennon’s psyche. “Every break in the dressing room, I’d go on YouTube and search for early footage of Lennon, to hear his voice, try to copy and see his mannerisms and body language,” Johnson says. Then he got lucky. “I was talking to Kick-Ass scriptwriter Jane Goldman, saying, ‘I’ve got to play guitar, and I ain’t got one,’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve got one,’ and she brought it in and I’d practice trying to pick up chords.”
Taylor-Wood’s first feature casts Kristin Scott Thomas as the buttoned-up Aunt Mimi and Anne-Marie Duff as Lennon’s live-wire mother—who is killed by a car just as the teenage Lennon is beginning to know her again. “When his mother died, he put the barriers up. Hid it all away. So the music—rock-’n’-roll frustration, rebellion—became the voice to his art form,” Johnson observes. The young English actor’s performance shows him acquiring, blow by blow, the bitter inner loneliness that formed Lennon’s raging creativity. “We pulled it back to try and find the defensive, vulnerable, ordinary guy,” he says. “Most people remember the arrogant, cocky guy in the Beatles, and when you see him play, he’s the only one who’s got a strong stance and a firm grip and a tight upper lip—he’s aggressive, the way he strokes the guitar. . . . And the others are happy la-la-la-la.”
Johnson managed the singing pretty well, too, including “Hello Little Girl,” permission for which Taylor-Wood—who became his girlfriend during the shooting last spring—“had to go round and get the rights from Paul McCartney.” McCartney gave his OK, as did Yoko Ono, who approved the use of Lennon’s heartrending autobiographical track “Mother,” whose meaning jumps into full significance as the credits roll. What, though, did Johnson think of his fiancée’s method as a director? “I don’t know how to say this without sounding biased, but because she’s an artist, and creative-minded, she just understands how to communicate and pull out incredible emotions and dig quite deep,” he says. “And she’s such a warm, wonderful woman, when she walks in, she lights up the set.”
Johnson and Taylor-Wood live in Primrose Hill, London, and this summer, at age 20, he became father to Taylor-Wood’s third daughter, Wylda Rae. “Sam’s this lovely, loving woman, you know,” Johnson says. “She’s always in tune with my thoughts, really.” Nowhere Boy will be released October 8, a day before the seventieth anniversary of John Lennon’s birth.