Sir Paul McCartney says his wife Nancy believes the late Queen Elizabeth II had a crush on him, and the Beatles star admits he once thought the young monarch was a babe too.
The 84-year-old music legend shared the lighthearted claim while speaking on comedian Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, where he looked back on the Queen, his early fame, and a few private memories that still make him smile.
Daily Mail reporting on the appearance captured McCartney describing a mutual soft spot that, in his telling, ran both ways, at least in family lore.
“The Queen. I loved The Queen. She was a doll,” he said.
"She was crowned when I was 11 and she was a babe. She was 23 or something, so we always used to think, ‘Wow, this is amazing’."
He did not stop there. McCartney said he and his generation liked the new monarch “in other ways than we should have liked her,” and that meeting her later felt special after the Beatles shot to global stardom. He first met Her Majesty around age 21.
His wife, Nancy Shevell, has her own read on the old royal chemistry. McCartney relayed it without pretension.
"Nancy, my wife now, she says, ‘She fancied you’. There’s no knowing if there’s any truth to that but I like to think it’s true."
That is the whole case as he presented it, no palace leak, no diary entry, just a husband’s willingness to enjoy the compliment. In an age when public figures often scrub every fond memory for fear of the next scolding, McCartney simply said he likes the idea and moved on.
He framed the crush as a product of its time. A king gave way to a young queen. A Liverpool teenager noticed. Decades later, a knight of the realm still calls her a babe without apology.
The same conversation turned to the forthcoming Beatles biopics from director Sam Mendes. Paul Mescal is set to play McCartney, with Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.
McCartney said the four Beatles “were all the same height.” Then Mendes sent a filming still of the actors crossing Abbey Road. One detail bothered him.
"And the Paul character is markedly smaller. I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller?! Don’t do this’. He said, ‘It’s just the stride pattern’, and he sent me another one where they were equal."
Mescal also earned a quiet seal of approval in person. McCartney said the actor came into the office, picked up the guitar part on “Blackbird,” and played along so cleanly that the songwriter figured the younger man already knew it better than he did. “OK, I’ll leave you to it,” McCartney concluded.
Not every recollection came out polished. McCartney repeated a claim he also made to The Guardian earlier this year: he half-believes he can remember being born on June 18, 1942, at Walton Hospital in Liverpool.
"Highly dubious, highly dubious, but I feel the white tiles and chrome instruments and the sounds. It’s probably total bulls***. In fact, it almost certainly is. An imagined memory! And I was a forceps delivery."
He described a clanging delivery room and the sense that doctors “had to pull me out.” He also said he does not fully understand the procedure and joked about pliers. The point was less medical history than honesty about how memory works, and how easily it can invent itself.
Harder memories sat nearby. His mother, Mary, died of cancer when he was 14. He did not know the cause at the time. What stayed with him was hearing his father, James McCartney, cry. “You grow up real quick,” he said, “because you never expect to hear your parents crying.” He learned to put a shell around himself rather than sit at home in tears, the style of the era, not today’s.
His latest album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, is packed with what he calls memory songs. “I like to go over memories, because it brings me back to the time. It brings me back to the people,” he said. The Queen remarks fit the same habit: a famous man still willing to sound like a kid from Liverpool when the subject is a young monarch who once lit up the postwar sky.
A culture that polices every glance and joke could learn something from an 84-year-old who still calls the Queen a babe and lets his wife’s theory stand.
