Teenage actor Aaron Johnson on playing legendary Beatle Photo

TEENAGER Aaron Johnson reckons he got lessons in being John Lennon every day at school.
Aaron, 19, plays the young Beatle in the new movie Nowhere Boy.
More than 20 actors have brought the legendary musician to life on screen – but Aaron believes he was best equipped for the task.
Both were outsiders and had little time for regimented lessons.
Aaron said: “I didn’t fit in at school. Schools are systems and they want you to do this, this and this. They don’t initially pick out what your skill is or what you’re capable of.
“It’s quite funny, that Lennon song Working Class Hero, with the line, ‘They hurt you at home and they hit you at school/They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool’ … I can empathise with him.
“He said he was a genius. I wouldn’t say that about myself.
“But he felt different from everybody else because he felt they were not pushing him or they didn’t understand him.”
Aaron’s early success as an actor left him feeling different from his classmates at a state school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
He appeared in Armadillo opposite Catherine McCormack at nine and played Sean Bean’s twin sons in Tom & Thomas at 10.
Aaron said: ” When I was 10, I had a director asking, ‘So what do you think?’ I had the freedom to speak up.
“So when I went back to school, and had such an open mind and opinions about things, I couldn’t agree with their system.
“It made me mature a lot quicker, I suppose. I don’t know what my age is, if I’m honest. If you put me in a room with a bunch of people my age, I’d think they were five years younger than me.”
Aaron – who was in Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging – is now engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother. He lives with Nowhere Boy’s director Sam Taylor-Wood, who is 42 and a mother of two.