Paul McCartney turned down appearing James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke numerous times.
Back in 2018, the Beatles legend featured in Corden’s popular Late Late Show segment in a 23-minute skit through the streets of Liverpool, while singing some of the band’s most iconic hits.
The video, which Corden said at the time was “quite possibly the best” episode of the show they had done, has since raked in 68million views.
However, the talk show host has revealed that getting Macca into the passenger seat wasn’t a simple task.
“He said, ‘I’m in, I’ll do it, I can’t wait,’” Corden recalled in a resurfaced 2021 interview with PaleyFest LA.
“Then about a month later, the message came through to us that he’d cancelled, he didn’t want to do it. He’d got cold feet for some reason. Then he was back in again two weeks later.”
He went on: “And then about eight or nine days before we were due to fly to Liverpool to do it, it was one of those nights where I woke up around 1am, and did that thing that we all shouldn’t do, which was just wake up and immediately look at my phone.
“And there was an email saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to write this, Paul has changed his mind. He just feels this is the wrong sort of thing for him right now. He’d still like to do it one day’.”
Corden added that while he would normally confer with his team, he decided to write McCartney an email in which he said that he found his cancellation “unacceptable”.
“I said, ‘I completely respect your decision not to do it, but I need you to understand what the knock on effect is for our show’.”
He explained that team members had flown to Liverpool to scout the area, and that they didn’t have the budget to “sustain” such an expense without a “finished product”.
He continued that he told the musical legend: “‘I guarantee you, I promise you, that it will be great. And the reason it will be great is that you are Paul McCartney’.”
He signed off by urging McCartney to reconsider, adding that he would respect his decision if he didn’t, but would like him to do something in return when they brought the show to London.
“And the next day [McCartney] said, ‘Alright. I’m sorry. I just had a wobble. I’m back in. I’ll do it’,” Corden said.
The talk show host revealed that even on the morning of the shoot, McCartney was reluctant.
The musician reportedly told Corden that he didn’t want to go back into his family home, adding he had hadn’t been there since he left.
“I just went, ‘Paul, your only day’s work today is to have a great time’,” Corden said, “‘and if you have a great time this is going to work’.”
McCartney later texted Corden to thank him for convincing him and that he “had a blast”.
Elsewhere, a new Paul McCartney documentary ‘Man On The Run’ is set to explore the musician’s post-Beatles life.
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