In “Better Man” — the new musical biopic of Robbie Williams — the British pop star gets in touch with his inner primate.
Indeed, the 50-year-old singer — who rose from the boy band Take That to become one of the biggest UK music icons of the 1990s and early ’00s — is transformed into a singing, dancing chimpanzee thanks to the wonders of CGI in the film that opens wide on Friday.
“I’ve been a cheeky monkey all my life,” Williams, who narrates the movie, told the Associated Press. “There’s no more cheekier monkey than the coke-snorting, sex-addict monkey that we find in the movie.”
And Williams believes that this ape take on his story — which traces his life from childhood to his struggles with addiction and depression at the height of his fame — benefits from seeing it through a furry-faced chimp.
“We care for animals more than we care for humans, most of us,” he told AP. “I guess there is a removal, as well. It’s very much a human story but if you’re watching it and someone’s playing Robbie Williams, you’re thinking: Does he look like him? Does he act like him? Does he talk like him?”
There were other reasons why it was better to work with a monkey than a man.
“With musical biopics, you deal with the star or their estate, and that gets hard,” director Michael Gracey told the Hollywood Reporter. “People want to protect their legacy and image, but ‘Better Man’ has scenes where Robbie is highly unlikable. That’s way more relatable than a holier-than-thou star, so the monkey allows you to empathize in those uncomfortable moments. We feel more compassion watching animals suffer.
“Fortunately,” he added, “Rob was on board. He said, ‘I’m not interested in the glorified, watered-down version of my life.’”
The original if not outlandish spin on the music biopic for “Better Man” came from Gracey — who previously directed Hugh Jackman’s 2017 musical “The Greatest Showman” — after several interviews with Williams.
“So I went back to those recordings, and when I was listening to them, I found Rob saying often that he was just dragged up to perform, like a monkey,” he told Deadline. “And he said it enough times that I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how he sees himself. He literally sees himself as a performing monkey.’ And I thought, ‘That would be amazing; I would love to see that film.’ That’s where the idea came from.”
And Gracey was not monkeying around about his artistic vision.
“It came down to Rob’s engaging storytelling — and the monkey,” he told THR. “If I hadn’t come up with the monkey as a creative way in, I never would’ve made ‘Better Man.’”
The CGI chimp — the only non-human in “Better Man” — actually has Williams’ own eyes, but actor Jonno Davies is the man behind its motion and voice.
“There were certain things where Jonno would smile, but Michael wanted a smile that was more Robbie Williams,” visual effects supervisor Luke Millar told IndieWire. “We called them ‘Robbie-isms’ that were injected throughout the picture. And that’s just to create that quintessential likeness to the person we’re representing.”
To that end, the great ape rocks everything from Williams’ eyebrows to his tattoos. “Michael wanted people to be able to look at Robbie the ape and see Robbie the singer,” Millar said. “So we worked up a lot of concept work trying to lean into the human aspects. We tried human teeth, human hairstyles, human eyes, human everything, and we very quickly got into a very strange place where we were starting to lose the chimp at that point.”
But the chimp didn’t come cheap. “The monkey also meant almost tripling the budget of most musical biopics, so it took years to finance,” Gracey told THR.
For Williams, “Better Man” is a chance for him to make a better name for himself in the US. Despite all of his success in the UK — with hits such as “Angels,” “Millennium,” “Let Me Entertain You” and “Rock DJ” — he has never truly conquered the States.
“In America, they’re like ‘Who’s this guy?’” he told the New York Times, admitting that he’s gotten “slightly jealous” of the attention his chimp counterpart has been getting.
“I was like, ‘What if the monkey breaks America and I don’t?’”
