Robbie Williams on why he’s played by a chimp in new film
Robbie Williams is thoroughly enjoying his wander into the world of film, even if he is still learning the correct lingo.
“I was at this thing called the Governors’ Ball the other night. That was amazing,” the singer says.
He is talking about the Governors’ Awards, held in Los Angeles, where he joined other guests including Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig.
“I’m super excited because it’s all brand new to me. I feel like an artist that’s just been signed. I’m full of hope, full of excitement, bewildered by it all.”
The project that currently has him walking red carpets with the biggest names in Hollywood is his biopic Better Man.
“Kevin Costner sought me out,” he giggles, adding with growing incredulity: “He wanted to come and tell me about the movie.”
Better Man deals with Williams’ life from childhood, through the Take That years, to about 2003, the year he broke records by playing three huge gigs at Knebworth (with the aim of annoying Oasis, who had only managed two).
The twist in the tale, or tail, is that throughout the film, and with no explanation, he is portrayed on screen as a monkey.
At least that is how everyone involved in the film refers to the animal. If Sir David Attenborough veered into film reviewing, he would be quick to point out, in hushed tones, that the creature singing Angels and Rock DJ is a chimpanzee, not a monkey – because it has no tail.
To paraphrase the debut album of Williams’ old boyband, Ape That and Party.
Better Man has been nominated for best song at the Golden Globes
Williams is speaking to me at London’s Soho Hotel, a venue so popular with the movie industry that at the exact same time, Rupert Everett is presenting an award on one floor, while in the basement there is a screening of a documentary produced by Jennifer Lawrence.
Williams is sitting next to Michael Gracey, the director of 2017 hit The Greatest Showman.
Now, after a gap of seven years, Better Man is Gracey’s next film, and it was his idea to turn the main man into a monkey.
For a year and half, Williams and Gracey had been sending messages back and forth, discussing a possible film musical based on his life.
“There have been a lot of musical biopics,” says Gracey. “I wanted to come at this with a different lens.
“Quite often Rob will say, ‘I’m just like a performing monkey’ or ‘I’m up the back like a performing monkey’.
“It just sparked this idea of, we’ve got this chance to tell this story, not from the perspective of how we see Rob, but how he sees himself.
The monkey was created by Weta, the special effects company responsible for Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in Planet of the Apes. They used a combination of motion capture and CGI, with the role and the speaking voice taken on by English actor Jonno Davies, best known as Tobias in the Al Pacino TV series Hunters.
But it turns out that the original plan was for Williams himself to play the monkey.
“I was going to, but it involved me leaving my family for loads and loads of months,” he says. “And the thought of that was just too much for me to bear.
“There are loads of things that I want to do that are just best being an idea. It was great at dinner parties, ‘I’m playing me in a story about me.’
“And by the time it came round to it, I was bored of the idea. ‘I’ve said it at dinner parties now. I’ve done it.'”
“And so I pitched the idea to Rob. I said, ‘You know, if you were to be an animal, how would you see yourself?'”
Williams takes up the story: “I was looking for some self-worth at the time and I was like, ‘I am a lion’. And he just cocked his head and went, ‘Mmmm.’
“I went, ‘Monkey?’
“And he went, ‘Yeah, so here’s the idea.’ And before the end of the sentence was out of his mouth, I’m like, ‘Yes, that, that, that, please’.”
Me and My Monkey
Williams did perform the whole of My Way while wired up to help with the motion capture, at a specially arranged pair of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 2022.
“We also scanned his eyes,” explains Gracey, “So when you look at the monkey’s eyes, it’s actually one for one Rob’s eyes.”
“I kind of don’t want to know which bit’s me and which bit’s not me,” interrupts Williams.
“I want the magic of the film just to be the magic of the film.
“Also, Jonno, who plays me, has got a wonderful bottom and I want to believe that bit is me, that my bum will be memorialised as that epic.”
Robbie Williams sums up Better Man as “the greatest hits of my trauma for the TikTok generation”.
And the film doesn’t shy away from dealing with his drug addictions and mental health problems, or when Nicole Appleton from All Saints was pregnant with their child and was pressured by people in the music industry, she said, into having an abortion.
“My part in her life I still have shame about. It’s the most difficult part of the film for me to watch,” Williams admits.
“She did me no harm and is a kind, lovely person. I was an idiot younger boyfriend.”
Chimp off the old block
Appleton is supportive of the film and was consulted throughout production – unlike Williams’ father Peter Conway, a singer with whom he has performed many times over the years.
In Better Man, he is played by Inside No 9’s Steve Pemberton and portrayed as someone who let down his family.
“He hasn’t seen it yet. And I don’t know if I want him to,” says Williams.
“I haven’t spoken to him about it. I’m embarrassed. I love my dad. Best mate, charming, wonderful man.
“But as it is with everybody’s childhood, like the Philip Larkin poem, ‘They mess you up your mum and dad.’ And I’m messing my kids up.”
The film also paints a pretty poisonous portrait of Williams’ time in Take That.
“There’s a pattern – boys join a boyband, boyband becomes huge, boys get sick. And I don’t think anybody gets to escape that,” is his summary.
“I don’t know what it is completely about fame that warps. I just know that it does. I know that young fame, in particular, is corrosive and toxic. It should come with a health warning.”
The death earlier this year of One Direction’s Liam Payne, who he mentored on The X Factor in 2010, has made him want to change the way boybands are looked after.
“It’s going to take a bunch of creatives to sit around, and I want to head that. I want to do that,” he says.
“It has to be creative people, not members of Parliament or record company bosses. I think this needs to be oversensitive people with complicated inner lives, who understand what it’s like to have a complicated inner life and what help that would need.”
But these plans will have to wait.
In 2010 Robbie Williams mentored Liam Payne on The X Factor, when he was starting out in One Direction
At the moment, Williams’ full attention is on the film and the Oscars.
Success in the US is quite a change for a singer who famously never broke America. (Angels reached 53 in the Billboard chart, Millennium 72 and that was it.)
In 2002, he even made fun of the situation with the self-deprecating I Will Talk And Hollywood Will Listen, in which the title rhymed with the lyric “Mr Spielberg look just what you’re missing”.
How things change. Better Man has already earned a Golden Globe nomination for best song. And on Tuesday, he will find out whether Forbidden Road, which plays over the end credits, is among the 15 songs on the shortlist for the Academy Awards.
And there are other categories in which the film could get a nomination.
“Best visual effects,” starts Gracey, before Williams interjects once more.
“Best musical monkey!” he beams.
Gracey laughs. “If that was a category, we would definitely win.”
Hollywood is indeed starting to listen.
Better Man opens in cinema on 26 December.