In the grand retelling of his life, Robbie Williams wanted to be a lion. To be as strong, respected, and feared as the large cat tattooed on his right shoulder, or even as lithe as the tiger emblazoned on the front of his Rock DJ pants. “I was trying to find some self-worth at the time,” he says. “We all are, always. So I was like ‘I AM A LION!’”
Instead, in the gloriously bonkers musical biopic Better Man, from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, Williams is played not as the King of the jungle but as a clownish, CGI chimp.
The gimmick means that while Better Man hits all the typical biopic beats in telling the story of Williams’s life – absent dad, attention-seeking child, low self-esteem, meaningless sex, lines of drugs – the familiarity has a tinge of the uncanny valley, making it feel fresh. Like its subject, it’s funny, heartfelt, melancholy, cheeky and narcissistic – often all at once. But why, in an era of hugely successful biopics such as Rocketman (Elton played by hunky Taron Egerton) and Bohemian Rhapsody (Rami Malek with false teeth as Freddie), is Robbie Williams being played as a CGI animal at all?
“Let’s face it, a Robbie Williams biopic without the monkey is way less appealing, or intriguing,” the singer says matter of factly. “It would be interesting to my fans, but not to anyone else.” And he’s right; it’s rare to see a Hoover bag of cocaine consumed by a chimp in front of an approximation of the very human Gallagher brothers. Or, as in another scene, Robbie-the-monkey getting a handjob in a nightclub from a fan.
You just don’t get that with Rocketman, I say. “No, but you should have,” smiles Williams. Besides, despite his early protestations, Williams has always seen himself as a performing monkey since joining Take That as a 16-year-old in 1990. “I am very aware that I am stunted,” he says, deadly serious for a second. “I’m very aware that I am unevolved.”
Sat cross-legged on a plush sofa in a London hotel suite, Williams, a youthful 50, looks dapper in a double-breasted brown suit and leopard-print loafers (no socks). A hectic film promo schedule and family life (he and his wife, actor Ayda Field, have four children) means he’s happy but tired. Next to him sits Gracey, an Australian who has shown up looking like early yoga-era Chris Martin, his oversized beanie hat accented by a loosely tied scarf. Perhaps he’s still trying to find his zen; he admits the film’s bizarre concept “terrified people” in early meetings with studios. “Convincing financiers was really hard. People would go ‘the director of The Greatest Showman plus Robbie Williams, we are in’. And then you go ‘one thing, Rob’s going to be played as a monkey’. That was the end of so many finance meetings.”
Williams and Gracey make for an amusing double act, with the latter’s attempts at flattery pierced by very British self-mockery. “When we first started talking [about doing a film] it was because I heard Rob at dinner parties talking …” says Gracey.
“… about myself,” interrupts Williams.
“Yeah, basically. What I really enjoyed isn’t just the story but the way in which Rob tells it,” Gracey continues. “It was fascinating.” With perfect timing Williams yawns for what feels like 30 seconds. It’s noticeable that whenever the attention drifts away from Williams he loses focus: at one point he downs a big glass bottle of water as Gracey talks about decamping to Williams’s LA studio to interview him about his life; when Gracey details the making of a truly spectacular musical number set to Rock DJ and filmed in London’s Regent Street, Williams wanders off to get some Nicorette gum from his PR.
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I ask Williams why he wanted to do a biopic now: “I am a professional attention seeker,” he says. “Without attention I cease to exist. Professionally I need to do this. Because this is my job. This is how you advertise that you’re still here. My job, fortunately or unfortunately, revolves around eyes being on you.”
This love-hate relationship with fame underpins Better Man’s darkest moments. We see the effect it has on Williams’s mental health, and also on his relationships both with his family and the friends he’s left behind in Stoke. At one point, in a bold fusion of Planet of the Apes and Trainspotting, we see Williams injecting heroin in his bathroom. Later we see him attempting suicide with a razor blade. “There are some very confronting moments,” agrees Gracey, “and to Rob’s credit, he didn’t change one frame of the film. That’s important to say because I think a lot of people would weigh in and say ‘that’s going too far, take that out’.”
Gary Barlow said: I read the script and I come off worse than Darth Vader in the first Star Wars
Perhaps the most shocking passage involves his relationship with All Saints’ Nicole Appleton, who he started dating in 1998 and to whom he was briefly engaged. Their meet-cute is rendered as a glittering ballroom dance fantasia soundtracked by She’s the One, but via a flash forward montage we’re also shown Appleton being pressured by her management team into aborting their baby. When I mention how tough those scenes were, Williams looks to Gracey to respond. “It was the bit that Rob was most protective of,” he says. “He was very clear that unless Nicole was on board that this wasn’t something we could do.”
Williams looks a bit lost before snapping back into the room. “Also, how fucking insane is that,” he says. “That you were guided, nay made, to terminate a life because of being in a pop band. And because I lived through it, you’re kind of numb. Incredibly fucking sad while it was happening and traumatic, mainly for Nic, but also for me because I thought I was going to be a father in that moment and was happy to embrace that. It’s only now that you go ‘what the fuck? That’s insane’.”
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In the last few years there’s been a reckoning with some of the behaviour metered out to very young adults in the pressure-cooker pop industry of the 90s and 00s. Williams recently appeared on the BBC’s Boybands Forever documentary detailing what he saw as prolonged bullying by Take That’s then manager Nigel Martin-Smith, who in turn countered that Williams was using him as a scapegoat for his problems.
Today’s interview also takes place in the stark light of One Direction member Liam Payne’s tragic death at just 31, a topic that Williams chooses not to speak about directly out of respect for Payne’s family. He’s hopeful, however, that things can change for the current crop of pop stars and that “myself and a group of creative people with sensitive, complicated lives, can get in a room and say ‘what can we do?’ – hopefully we can come up with something.”
Williams sees our confrontation with the past as more complicated, however. As he wrote on Instagram in an open letter to Martin-Smith after the first part of Boybands Forever aired, he doesn’t see it as simply apportioning blame. “What we didn’t know back then I don’t think we can be held accountable for,” he says now. “And we didn’t understand mental illness, and we didn’t understand breakdowns, and the people that were going through them – me – didn’t know they were having one. I didn’t know I was depressed. How could I? The people that are around you need a bit of grace.” He does however think there should be some self-reflection. On Instagram, Williams suggested Martin-Smith needed a “glow-up where redeemable features are concerned” asking him to contemplate his role in the band’s mental health issues.
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(clockwise from lower left) Robbie Williams, Mark Owen, Gary Barlow, Jason Orange and Howard Donald. Photograph: L Busacca/WireImage
Did he have anyone around him during his Take That years that he could turn to? “No, and neither did they,” he says. “I wasn’t the only person isolated. There were five boys isolated. We were all having this fucking insane experience. There has to be an amount of disassociation whilst trying to understand all of these brand new feelings while watching your life become warped. And living inside the warp is surreal.” He likens it to being on drugs. “I first took LSD when I was 15 and I shouldn’t have taken LSD when I was 15. I shouldn’t have taken fame. It’s the same thing. I’m glad I did, and I’m glad I’m through the other side, and I’m glad I’ve experienced what I’ve experienced, and achieved what I’ve achieved, but it is a drug like LSD.”
The villains in the story presented by Better Man shift constantly throughout. His dad, played as selfish and self-absorbed by Steve Pemberton, is an early contender. Martin-Smith is another, while Gary Barlow, played as a nerdy librarian with two left feet, is shown sapping Williams’s confidence as Take That go from early performances in gay clubs to Top of the Pops.
“No, I’m the main villain,” Williams says. “I’m the main arsehole.”
“Yeah, one of the things Rob said very early on was that no-one comes across worse than he does,” adds Gracey.
“Because legally we couldn’t,” Williams quips. I point out that the notoriously litigious Martin-Smith (he sued Williams in 2006 for implying he ripped off Take That on his song The 90s) is introduced as a “first class cunt”. “Yeah, but that’s just an opinion,” smiles Williams.
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“It’s also a quote of something that’s been said in public,” adds Gracey. “At a concert. It’s on YouTube, it’s public knowledge.” I check afterwards and there it is, taken from a 2012 concert in Dublin.
As Barlow and Williams reconciled in 2008 – Better Man’s slightly jumbled timeline only goes as far as 2003 – Barlow was sent an early version of the film’s script. “He phoned me up and he’s like” – here Williams effortlessly glides into a perfect impression – “‘Rob, read the script, I come off worse than Darth Vader in the first Star Wars’. It was problematic for him. But that’s another one of those confusing things about our job – Gaz’s job, my job – is that we constantly revisit the past to propel our careers forward. And how I spoke, and how I thought, particularly about Gaz in those moments, I do not think in the same way about that man now. I feel guilt in some ways about how Gaz is represented in the film, but my want and need to tell my story outweighs the guilt that I feel.”
The early years of Take That represent some of Better Man’s liveliest scenes. We see the awkward dance rehearsals, the dodgy photoshoots and the general panic when Martin-Smith tells the band that “in five years we’re all going to hate each other”. It also shows them performing, often in leather and Lycra, at appreciative gay clubs, a time Williams remembers fondly. “Where I’m from we do two things really well; kindness and violence,” he says. “When you went out of an evening it was highly likely that violence was in your near future. And you always had to be hyper aware of who you’d pissed off. When I went into the gay world there was none of that. There was total acceptance and humour and gay abandon. And safety. That’s what I take with me to this day; it was an incredibly safe place for me to grow up.”
Honestly, you’ve never met somebody that wants to be gay as much as me
Rumours around Williams’s sexuality are also playfully mentioned in the film, but it’s a complicated topic. In 2004, a tabloid newspaper ran an interview with Williams’s alleged “secret gay lover”, suggesting that Williams was deceiving the public by claiming to have sex with women to cover his “sordid homosexual encounters with strangers”. He sued the paper a year later for libel and won substantial damages and an apology.
“Here’s the thing: are you straight or are you gay?” he asks. I tell him I’m gay. “OK, I’ll ask you this: There is a front cover of a newspaper that is read by millions and a lady has said you have performed cunnilingus on her by a canal. Do you, as a gay person, sue the newspaper?” I tell him I wouldn’t sue, but I’d be annoyed because it’s not true. “I was annoyed,” he says. “I was more sad. Not about gay accusations because look, I’ve done everything but suck a cock. Honestly, you’ve never met somebody that wants to be gay as much as me.” He then further dispels any lingering rumours by reaching for a football analogy. “I’m a Port Vale fan and it’s like somebody going ‘well you’re a Liverpool fan’,” he says turning to Gracey. “And me saying ‘no I’m not, I’m a Port Vale fan’. When somebody says you’re a Liverpool fan a hundred times it’s like ‘I’m not a fucking Liverpool fan, why do people think I’m a Liverpool fan?!’.”
Later, looking genuinely concerned, he brings the topic up again. “You want to be an ally while at the same time protecting your own authenticity and your own life,” he says. “Besides, if I want to suck a cock, I’ll suck a cock. Who’s going to fucking stop me? My wife? The beard!”
Williams has spent two books (2004’s Feel and 2017’s Reveal), last year’s four-part Netflix documentary series and a good amount on therapy reflecting on the interplay between his life and fame. Since marrying Field in 2010 and starting a family, the way he approaches it has shifted. “‘Daddy goes to work’, that’s what I say now,” he says. “It wasn’t a job before. It was something that was supposed to be magical and when I got to the top of the mountain all that was there was existential crisis. But since [Theodora] arrived, I’ve grown up, and one of the big [changes] is, it’s a job.”
He’s stopped “trying to be Liam Gallagher” and is comfortable being “more Val Doonican”. A performing monkey, sure, but a great one. He also doesn’t care if calling it a job makes it seem a bit unromantic, or not very rock’n’roll. “People say ‘how dare you call it a job, all you do is X, Y and Z’, but just because your job is shit doesn’t mean my job has to be shit.”
He smiles a big, gloriously obnoxious Robbie Williams grin. “This is my job – and I fucking love it.”
Better Man is released in the UK on 26 December. The soundtrack is released digitally on 27 December. Robbie Williams tours the UK, Ireland and Europe next summer.