Once you’ve been in a boyband, it is impossible to shed that image no matter how long you go solo, as former Take That singer Robbie Williams now knows extremely well. So rather than shedding the image, Williams has chosen to embrace it fully by diving into a biopic Better Man, which explores his life from childhood all the way up to his years in Take That.
The one catch? Williams, played by actor Jonno Davies, is a monkey throughout the film – a decision that was the brainchild of both the singer himself and director Michael Gracey. In an interview with the BBC, Williams and Gracey recalled the thought process that went into that particular creative liberty.
“There have been a lot of musical biopics,” said 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.”
Gracey added that he pitched the idea to Williams to gauge his reaction. “I said, ‘You know, if you were to be an animal, how would you see yourself?'” recalled Gracey.
“I was looking for some self-worth at the time and I was like, ‘I am a lion’,” continued Williams. “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’.”
As per the BBC, 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, although the monkey’s eyes are Williams’ own. “We also scanned his eyes,” explained Gracey, “So when you look at the monkey’s eyes, it’s actually one for one Rob’s eyes.”
