When Michael Gracey thinks of Robbie Williams, “I think showman,” he said.
Gracey, who directed the 2017 movie musical “The Greatest Showman,” has some experience centering a big budget feature around a performer who can work a crowd. His latest is built around Williams.
“Better Man” tracks the singer’s rise to become one of Britain’s biggest stars in the ’90s and early 2000s, when he seemed to be a permanent fixture on the charts — and in the tabloids. Williams frequently winked at his showboating, bad-boy public persona in flamboyant, rabble-rousing hit songs like “Let Me Entertain You.” But he never found success stateside, and in making a Williams biopic, Gracey said he was aware that “in America, they’re like ‘Who’s this guy?’”
Gracey’s solution was to portray the pop star as a CGI primate. “If I hadn’t been able to crack that as an idea,” the Australian director said, “I wouldn’t have made the film.”
At the peak of his fame, Williams openly struggled with depression and addiction, which is depicted in raw detail in the film. In a video interview, Williams, 50, said “Better Man” was about “enduring and overcoming, near death experiences, self-abuse and impostor syndrome.” He grinned knowingly. “It’s a very modern musical,” he added.
Here’s what to know about the man behind the monkey.
How did Williams become famous?
Williams was born in Stoke-on-Trent, an industrial town in England’s West Midlands.
In 1990, aged 16, he auditioned to be a member of Take That, a five-piece act that became one of Britain’s biggest boy bands, with eight No. 1 singles.
Growing up in Australia, Gracey remembered Williams as the band member everyone was talking about. “It was undeniable he had a charisma to him, and a charm, and a cheekiness,” he said.
By 1995, at the height of the group’s fame, Williams had gained a reputation for partying, and raised eyebrows for drunkenly dancing onstage at Glastonbury during an Oasis set. Weeks later, he was kicked out of Take That. The band split up in 1996, and following the announcement, the Samaritans, a suicide prevention charity, set up a hotline for distraught teenage fans.
The British music journalist Miranda Sawyer compared Williams’s appeal to that of another cheeky northern lad: Harry Styles of One Direction.
She interviewed Williams in 1996, shortly after he left Take That. While “he was good in interviews, he was a great performer, and lots of women fancied him,” Sawyer said she was also struck by his vulnerability. After the interview, “I was worried about him,” she said. “I felt like phoning his mum.”
In Britain, the singer has had a total of 14 No. 1 albums — second only to The Beatles — and he has won more BRIT Awards, the British equivalent to the Grammys, than any other artist.
Now, with the release of “Better Man,” Williams said “I want to be omnipresent again, and to enjoy it this time.”
What is his music like?
After Take That, Williams had a hugely successful solo career. His best known songs, like “Angels,” “Millennium” and “Feel,” have an anthemic quality, with soaring, crowd-pleasing choruses suited to stadium tours and karaoke booths.
Sawyer described “Angels” in particular as “inescapable,” transcending genre to become “a song that people play at weddings and funerals.”
When Williams played the Bowery Ballroom in 1999, The Times’s Jon Pareles wrote that “his songs and his voice proudly echo the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and especially the Beatles.” Pareles described the singer’s lyrics as “lovelorn, flirtatious or cocky, leavening sentimentality and self-help with a sense of humor.”
How big of an international star was he?
Williams has had No. 1 hits in Britain, Ireland, Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand, among others. In Australia, Gracey said that “when Robbie dropped an album, we couldn’t escape it.”
In 2001, Williams released “Swing When You’re Winning,” an album of Rat Pack-style covers, and in 2002, at 28, he signed a record-breaking 80-million-pound, six-album deal with EMI.
He released albums in the United States but unlike other ’90s British pop stars such as the Spice Girls, he landed with little impact. British commentators saw the 2002 album “Escapology,” in particular, as an attempt to break the United States, but Williams said he never liked that narrative.
“You’re supposed to want it and need it,” Williams said of success in America, adding that he had chosen not to promote his records in the States so he could live there in anonymity, and protect his sanity.
“If I’d have broken America, I don’t know if I’d be on the planet,” he said.
How did this biopic come to be?
Gracey met Williams at a party in 2015 and struck up a friendship. The director became interested in making a film about Williams when he heard some of the singer’s stories. Gracey asked Williams if he could tape him telling them, and started drafting a screenplay based on 12 hours of audio recordings.
However, Gracey said that when he introduced “the monkey concept” to potential financiers, even the “more adventurous” ones were wary. It would be an expensive gamble, with the CGI effectively doubling the film’s budget. The monkey, he said, also eliminated any opportunity to reassure backers that the film was following a tried and tested formula.
Why is Williams portrayed as a monkey?
“The question,” Gracey said with a sigh.
Creatively speaking, musical biopics were a well-trodden path, the director said, and he wanted to do something different.
Listening to the recordings of Williams telling his stories, Gracey was struck by the number of times Williams referred to himself as “a performing monkey.”
In the film, the monkey has Williams’s own eyes, and while the actor Jonno Davies provides the monkey’s motion capture and voice acting, the singer himself narrates the story.
Williams said the upside to being portrayed by a CGI monkey was that everyone was talking about it. Next summer, Williams will embark on a European tour, and he said that the buzz around the film “nitros everything,” when it comes to ticket sales.
The downside, though, was that he recently caught himself “getting slightly jealous of the attention the monkey was getting.” He described a moment of madness: “I was like, ‘What if the monkey breaks America and I don’t?’”
What happened next?
“Better Man” focuses on the early part of Williams’ career, from his childhood through to the early 2000s. “The juiciest bits of my story are the beginning bits, of fame and addiction,” said Williams, who now lives between London and Los Angeles with the actress Ayda Field, whom he married in 2010. “A ‘Love, Actually’ version of me meeting my wife would be a different film,” he said, adding “I don’t think many people will be queuing for that.”
He said that the story, after the film ends, is one of “somebody that’s not completely done with accepting the fact that he’s an alcoholic, and an addict.”
Though he “went off looking for loopholes” and delayed his recovery, it was a different story now, he said. “I’m a happy, recovered, recovering addict with four kids,” he said. “I am now a better man.”
The post Robbie Williams Never Broke the U.S. Can His Biopic? appeared first on New York Times.
