Playing Ed Sullivan in “Midas Man” — the new biopic of Beatles manager Brian Epstein — Jay Leno didn’t aim to put on a “really big show” as the TV legend.
“They didn’t want an impression of Ed Sullivan,” the longtime “Tonight Show” host told The Post. “They just wanted someone who was a TV presenter.
“So I said, ‘I’m gonna get killed because I don’t do an impression.’ But it was OK. I think people understood that I wasn’t trying to [imitate him].”
The film, which is streaming on Olyn, depicts how The Beatles made their US TV debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964. And the 74-year-old comedian, then 13, was one of the record 73 million viewers glued to the tube.
“It’s one of the biggest nights of viewership ever,” he said. “We were in the TV room, and we had our TV trays, and I think my mom had made pizza.”
But Leno’s father was less hyped about the hoopla surrounding The Beatles.
“So I say to my dad, ‘You know, Pop, The Beatles write all their own music,’ ” Leno recalled. “My father goes, ‘You know something — some guy gives these kids a couple of bucks to go out there and act loony, and you all fall for it.’ That was my dad’s impression of The Beatles. I thought it was the funniest thing ever. It just made me laugh.”
Leno, though, was schooled early on by The Beatles while growing up in Andover, Massachusetts.
“My mother is from Scotland, and all her sisters would occasionally go back to Scotland. And one day they came back and brought me some records from the UK, and they were Beatles records,” he said. “So I was like the first guy in our area to have a Beatles record, and it was, like, a huge deal. It’s not like today, where things get released worldwide all at the same time. People were stunned: ‘How did you get those records?’ ”
Leno took his Beatles fandom beyond the music.
“I remember one of the stores was selling Beatles wigs when I was a kid, and I bought one,” he said. “Anything with The Beatles on it sold.”
In fact, he continued, “I remember when Lorne Greene had a song out called ‘Ringo.’ Well, people thought it was about Ringo Starr. The record went to No. 1, and it’s not about Ringo Starr, it’s not a Beatles record. But just the name ‘Ringo’ made this song popular.”
In “an age of such innocence,” Leno said that “The Beatles were kind of acceptable to your parents.”
But the Fab Four were also the future. “The Beatles immediately made Elvis old-fashioned,” he said.
Eventually, fate would have it that Leno got to bond with a certain Beatle.
“Over the years, I got to work with Paul McCartney a couple times. It was really a thrill,” he said. “And, you know, it’s funny, when I met Paul McCartney, he seemed like he was from another generation. But he was only, like, eight years older than I was.”
For Leno, watching “The Ed Sullivan Show” was a special rite of a generation.
“The thing about watching ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ when I was a kid is when he would come out from behind the curtain, and for a millisecond you saw what was behind the curtain,” he recalled. “You always felt like you were getting an inside look at something.”
It’s “a fascinating time” that Leno gets to revisit in “Midas Man.”
“I mean, just the idea of everybody waiting for a specific time to watch something happen — it doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “That’s sort of gone forever.”