V Weekend: Robbie Williams is ready to entertain you — once again
The Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man, reveals his appalling lows and triumphant highs in an ever-candid way — and Australia turned out to be the most fitting place to film the pop legend’s story.
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If Robbie Williams wanted to make a biopic that would reveal his true self, he could have hardly picked a better place to do it than Australia.
The British pop superstar has been playing arenas, stadiums, wineries, clubs and even the AFL Grand Final here for more than two decades, and he says it’s one of the few places on the planet where he can not just show his true colours, but he’s actually celebrated for being who he is.
“In Australia I’m allowed to be the creature that I wanted to be when I was dreaming of being a pop star growing up,” Williams says over a Zoom call from London, ahead of the Boxing Day release of Better Man, the brilliantly bonkers biopic in which he’s played by a computer generated monkey.
“There is a full embracing of me and my character and in this day and age where people get cancelled for saying the most banal things, I’m very aware of that in England. I’m not aware of that in Australia when I come there. I say things in Australia that I couldn’t say in the UK and I’m allowed to.
“I have just fallen in love with your country and the people and if I could be born again anywhere it would be Australia.”
Williams has had a complicated relationship with his native UK ever since he shot to fame as a teenager with the hugely successful boy band Take That. When he was booted out of the quintet in 1995 due to his increasingly erratic booze and drug fuelled behaviour and launched a solo career the following year, he became one of the biggest pop artists ever to come out of England – with an equally passionate following in Europe and Australia – shifting millions of albums and breaking records for ticket sales.
But at the same time, he became something of a punching bag for the notoriously fickle and sometimes downright rabid UK press. The vitriol, the glare and his ongoing substance abuse exacerbated his crippling anxiety, depression and low self-esteem and so while outwardly he should have been on top of the world, his childhood dreams of fame and fortune had become a private nightmare.
“We have that tall poppy syndrome, which I’m aware that you do down there, too,” he says. “There is a decapitating of your own when they become successful and mine happened because I’m English. It felt like anybody else that wasn’t at my gig f--king detested me. So there’s 70,000 in the stadium – but there’s 91 million that just can’t abide me. That’s how it felt.”
After spending years in the US, where he met his American actor wife Ayda Fields and enjoyed a more low-key level of fame that meant he could mostly walk down the street unrecognised, Williams recently returned to the UK to live with their four children.
And despite remaining a huge live drawcard – this month he announced yet another stadium tour of the UK and Europe – he says his relationship with his homeland has changed “because I’m not omnipresent”.
“When I turn the TV on, they no longer talk about me,” he says. “I’m not picking up from the TV what the mood of the nation is because I’m not mentioned … Now whether this film kicks all of that up again, it’s left to be seen but this time I’m not a survivor of childhood that’s trying to figure out how to be a grown-up.
“I know who I am now. I didn’t when it was happening the first time. I thought I was the person that they were saying all of these things about.” And though he now physically feels the ravages brought on by decades of performing, it’s a small price to pay for the peace he has finally found through years of therapy, without which he freely admits he might not even be here.
“When all of my faculties worked, when the muscles were the muscles and the heart was the heart and the energy was the energy – my mental health was shit,” he says. “My mental health is f---king amazing now. Even though I’ve got arthritis in the back and sciatica, I’d forgo that for how I feel between my ears.”
Williams celebrated his milestone 50th birthday earlier this year and for someone who doesn’t ordinarily like to look back, it’s found him in a rather retrospective mood. Firstly there was the four-part, self-titled documentary series that dropped on Netflix this time last year and featured present day Williams looking back on footage from his career with an almost alarming level of candour and vulnerability.
And now there’s Better Man, which was mostly shot by The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey in his home town of Melbourne and features Australian actors including Kate Mulvany as Williams’ mother and Damon Herriman as hard-nosed Take That manager Nigel Martin Smith.
Williams says that it wasn’t the milestone itself that sparked the bout of screen self-reflection. Instead, he says, it was a combination, taking advantage of ’90s nostalgia – “thank God for nostalgia, it prolonged my career” – a desire to stay relevant and the simple fact that he was asked to do it. Despite still packing out stadiums, he says he constantly gets asked: “What do you do these days?” – to which his standard answer is “f--k you – that’s what I do these days.”
“If you’re lucky enough to be alive and a biopic gets made about you then that’s what you do. You don’t really question the whys. You’ve just seen other people do them so you do them, and I guess the reason that you do them is so that you have the wind in your sails and your career keeps on going. Because nobody wants to be half or a quarter as successful as they once were.
“The universe has happened to present me with a jab that’s the documentary and this is the overhead right. This is the knockout punch.”
Gracey and Williams first crossed paths when the Aussie director was trying to convince Hugh Jackman to play the lead role in the 2017 mega-hit, The Greatest Showman. After asking for a favour, Gracey visited Williams’ home in Los Angeles and outlined the ambitious musical project and the pop star grew more and more impressed and excited, expecting that any second, the director was going to offer him the flashy lead role of circus impresario P.T. Barnum.
“In my head I’m just going, ‘Yeah, just ask me – I’ll say yeah’,” recalls Williams with a laugh. “And then he went, ‘so here is the favour’ and I was like, ‘anything, mate’ and he said ‘I want you to ask Hugh Jackman to play the lead in this movie.’
“And I was crestfallen – but I did. I sent Hugh a message and was very, very enthusiastic and effusive about what I had just seen and heard and said, ‘Look, if you don’t do this, I will bludgeon you with a teacup for this role.’”
Jackman not only took the part but Williams became his north star for capturing ringmaster Barnum’s flair and stage presence in the acclaimed musical that went on to make more than $600m at the global box office.
“Unbeknown to me, Hugh had admired what I do with my job and how I am on stage,” says Williams. “Which is incredible because I had – and have – a man crush on Hugh. So to hear that was like, ‘Oh wow, that’s really cool.’ We emailed and I called him not so long ago and I think the man crush goes both ways.”
Williams and Gracey also became friends and as they got to know each other, the Aussie was impressed by the pop star’s storytelling skills, not to mention his recall of detail even of moments and events he spent in a haze of drugs and alcohol. Gracey convinced Williams to record his life story over a period of about 18 months, and the more he listened back to them, the more he started to form a vision in his head of what would become Better Man.
There was a twist though – and it was a doozy. Williams had referred to himself in the recordings time and time again as a “performing monkey” so rather than casting around to find an actor who could look, dance and sing like the megastar, Gracey posited a more unorthodox idea.
“He asked me what my spirit animal was and I was trying to derive some self-worth for myself at the time and, chin up, chest out, I went ‘lion’ and he just cocked his head and squinted and was like ‘mmm … really?’,” Williams says.
“And I was like ‘monkey?’ and he said, ‘There you go, OK so here’s the idea – everybody in the movie is human apart from you and you’re a CGI monkey’ and before he got to the end of the sentence I was like, ‘Yes, I’m in.’”
While Williams was fitted up with the Lycra suit and performance capture dots for some of the live scenes, including two shows at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena that doubled as the 1998 Brit Awards – most of the acting and voice work of Better Man’s Robbie was done by British actor Jonno Davies.
The monkey effects were done by Weta Digital, the company behind The Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes, but Williams says that Davies captured his essence so well that he struggled to tell in the final film which parts were actually him.
“I did quite a bit of the live stuff in the film and what is amazing was when I watched the Knebworth bit I thought they’d got footage from the original thing, including my performance,” he says. “But that’s Jonno doing me. It’s f--king mind-blowing.”
Williams was, however, adamant that he wouldn’t sanitise his own story, and that Better Man should recognise his sometimes appalling, selfish and reckless behaviour and desperate lows as well as his many triumphs and accolades. “I don’t have the intelligence to remove those bits because I don’t see them as wrong,” he explains. “I just see them as part of my journey and hopefully people really respond to authenticity, and also that people really exist in grey areas.
“None of us are saints and even though we would like to delude ourselves thinking that we are and we are self-righteous and we’ve never put a step wrong – subconsciously even the best amongst us will recognise themselves when I am a d--khead because we’ve all been d--kheads.”
But as much as he was willing to reveal his own flaws and misdemeanours, the filmmakers had to be more careful in representing some of the other real-life figures in Better Man, from his family, former flames and bandmates, to the various rogues and chancers he met in his journey from dreamy teen in Stoke-on-Trent to global superstar.
Williams says that the hardest scenes for him to watch were the death of his beloved gran and those involving Nicole Appleton of All Saints fame, whom he nearly married in the ’90s. “Everybody in the movie that does get thrown under the bus because of who I was and what I thought at the time did something to me. Nicky never did something to me – she was just all good, and so watching that’s difficult because I am the only villain in that piece.”
Appleton was sent and approved the script that included scenes depicting their tumultuous time together – and her terminating a pregnancy – but Williams’ former Take That bandmate Gary Barlow was a little more jumpy.
Williams’ ejection from the band is played out warts and all in the film and though they have since made up and even reunited for a tour, Barlow had some concerns about how their fractious relationship has been represented.
“For Gaz to receive that was traumatic,” says Williams. “The script did change because Gaz was like, ‘Rob’ – and we’re mates so there was no shouting or pointing fingers or calling each other names – he was just like, ‘Rob, I’ve just read the script, I come off worse than Darth Vader in the first Star Wars’, which made me f--king piss myself laughing.
“So we did tame the script down but, at the same time, I was like, ‘Gaz, mate, I’ve got to tell my story.’ I said that if this was a film – Robbie Williams the years 2012 to 2024 – it’d be a love letter to Gary Barlow. But it’s not. I speak and think and feel like I spoke and thought and felt when I was that age. And when I was that age it was Lord of the Flies. I wasn’t great and neither was he and that’s just how it was.”
Looking back on his extraordinary journey, Williams knows he’s been lucky. The recent death of One Direction’s Liam Payne, who he loved and had mentored, hit him hard and inspired a touching Instagram post recognising their shared “trials and tribulations” and pleading for more kindness, compassion and empathy for those in the public gaze.
The fact that he has lived to tell his life story when others tragically haven’t is not the source of his gratitude, but he admits “it should be”.
“The gratitude is just understanding what a gift my life is and how lucky I’ve been, full stop,” he says. “It’s wonderful, the arc of the story for me, because now I’m out the other side, and I can say this is what it was like whilst knowing it isn’t. F-ck me – I’m about to get lucky again. You know what I mean? It’s just all shapes of awesome and it happens to coincide with getting well.”
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