“Very traumatic”: why Ana de Armas was cut from Danny Boyle movie ‘Yesterday’
For years, fans all over the world have shuddered at the thought of an alternate reality in which The Beatles never existed. Danny Boyle turned their worst nightmare into an idea for a feature with 2019’s Yesterday, following the bizarre journey of a virtually anonymous musician who finds himself on a planet which is completely devoid of the Fab Four’s magic.
Himesh Patel delivers a career-high performance as the struggling protagonist, who is almost about to give up on his ambition of making it in the ruthless music industry. After his involvement in a bus accident that is paired with a strange phenomenon, Patel’s character slowly begins to realise that nobody around him has ever heard of the most famous band in history. Seeing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he starts performing The Beatles’ timeless catalogue and passes it off as his own.
Interestingly, Ana de Armas was also a part of the project but her character was ultimately removed from the final cut of Yesterday. As the protagonist, Jack Malik undergoes his meteoric rise to the top, de Armas was supposed to feature as a celebrity guest on James Corden’s talk show. He performs a beautiful rendition of ‘Something’, completely mesmerising de Armas, who wears her emotions wonderfully on her dynamic face.
According to Richard Curtis, who wrote the screenplay, the scene in question was loved by the cast and crew, who were blown away by de Armas’ small but powerful contribution. However, test audiences felt that the on-screen chemistry between Patel and de Armas was a kind of betrayal of his relationship with Lily James’ Ellie.
Curtis explained: “That was a very traumatic cut because she was brilliant in it. I mean, really radiant. And [that] turned out to be the problem… I think the audience likes the story [about Ellie and Jack] and goes with that, and it works out well. What we’d originally done was had, I don’t want to describe it too much but had Ana de Armas as a complicating factor when he arrived in LA for the first time.”
While it would definitely have been interesting to explore the consequences of fame through an affair with de Armas’ Roxanne, Boyle eventually decided that it was not worth the effort. The entire segment was eliminated, along with any potential room for romance.
“I think the audience did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed,” Curtis added. “Because then some people would go, ‘Oh, he really doesn’t deserve her. He really doesn’t deserve Lily.’ You know, it’s one of those things where it’s some of our favourite scenes from the film, but we had to cut them for the sake of the whole.”
Two especially enthusiastic Ana de Armas fans were so enraged by this excision that they actually sued Universal for $5million, claiming that they were misled into watching Yesterday because they thought de Armas was in the film. They wanted adequate compensation for the false advertisement and the subsequent wastage of their time and resources.
US district judge Stephen Wilson ended up throwing out the case, as was always going to be the case. As per the rulings, the fans had no reason to believe that the version they accessed was going to be any different from the others that do not include de Armas in the credits.
Watch the deleted scene below.
