Paul McCartney Joins Johnny Depp & Crew For ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Talesâ

After wrapping Disney’s Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have gone back to add an extra big set-piece scene. I’ve heard that it is built around Paul McCartney, who quietly has joined the cast of the film. The picture, the fifth installment of the Pirates Of The Caribbean series, stars Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa, Javier Bardem as the villainous Captain Salazar, and Brenton Thwaites and Kaya Scodelario play new characters and Orlando Bloom returns as Will Turner. No one was telling me what role McCartney plays. All I was told is that this is not a re-shoot, but rather an extra scene, and that there is plenty of time to add it because the film isn’t being released until May 26, 2017.

Insiders said the studio is bullish on the first film in the series to be helmed by theKon-Tiki directing team, and those insiders likened it to the spirit of the first one in the series. The last one, the Rob Marshall-directed Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, grossed over $1B globally.

The Pirates franchise has the distinction of capturing two primary architects of The British Invasion that changed the face of rock and roll in the ’60s; add the iconic Beatles front man McCartney to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who played Captain Teague, Jack Sparrow’s father, in On Stranger Tides(Depp always said that his Sparrow character mannerisms were inspired by Richards).

As for McCartney, he has a list of movie credits a mile long, but they are almost all for song contributions. He and fellow Beatles members John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr shared an Academy Award for Best Original Score for Let It Be, and his most memorable acting turns came playing himself in 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, which arrived the following year.