Better Man makes complete sense as a movie proposition. Music biopics are big business in the era of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, and there aren’t many British music icons bigger than Robbie Williams. All they had to do was find an actor to play Robbie, pen a script around his up-and-down career journey, and then watch the cash roll in when the movie debuts in UK cinemas on Boxing Day.
But that’s not what Better Man is, if early reports are to be believed. Better Man, directed by The Greatest Showman‘s musical specialist Michael Gracey, sounds like it’s going to entirely up-end the biopic format, starting with the decision to portray Williams through the medium of a CGI monkey.
It should be said that we don’t know for sure about the monkey. Deadline reported this idea way back in 2021 but, since then, it hasn’t always been mentioned in stories about the production. In more recent articles, we’ve heard euphemistic descriptions of the film taking a “fantastical” approach and delivering “a very original exercise in storytelling”.
They’re almost certainly talking about the monkey. Notably, Peter Jackson’s company Wētā FX lists Better Man as an upcoming production on its website. Given their simian experience on Jackson’s King Kong and the recent Planet of the Apes movies, they’d be a prime choice for a project like this. Gracey, too, has form given the fact he was a VFX artist before making the transition to directing.
It’s not like Williams is beyond this sort of stuff either. In his 2002 track Me and My Monkey, he used the idea of a monkey to represent the way he acted while at the worst of his drug addiction.
In an interview with Deadline way back in 2021, Gracey said: “As for how we represent Robbie in the film, that bit is top secret. I want to do this in a really original way. I remember going to the cinema as a kid and there were films that blew me away and made me say as I sat there in the cinema, ‘I’ve never seen this before’. I just want the audience to have that feeling.”
Read more: Robbie Williams Forced To Cut Parts Of Biopic Due To Legal Threats (HuffPost)
A recent edition of the Popbitch gossip column claimed that American audiences were left “completely bemused” by a screening of an early cut in LA. They wrote: “It seems the cut of the film they were treated to contained no explanation whatsoever as to why Robbie is a monkey while the rest of the cast is entirely human.”
Of course, we don’t know any of this for sure until the film’s first official screening, which is scheduled to take place in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. We will almost certainly get a trailer for the movie around that time too, revealing the bizarre truth about Williams and the monkey ahead of the December 2024 release.
In the meantime, there is plenty that we know. Williams is playing himself — monkey or otherwise — with Jonno Davies as his younger counterpart, while Inside No. 9’s Steve Pemberton will play the star’s father. Kate Mulvany is portraying Williams’ mother, while Gavin and Stacey star Alison Steadman will be his beloved grandma Betty.
Read more: Robbie Williams interviewed in BBC boy band documentary from Louis Theroux (PA Media)
Williams will perform several of his most famous songs in the movie, including in concert scenes filmed during some of the star’s 2022 gigs at the Royal Albert Hall. But if it’s true that he will spend at least part of the film in the guise of a CGI monkey, this could be very bizarre indeed.
The genius of Robbie Williams is in his status as a pure showman. He has confessed in the past that he is neither the best singer or the best dancer around, but he is a truly electric performer possessed with immense on-stage charisma. It’s no surprise in that case that he wants to do something truly different with the movie version of his story.
Read more: Robbie Williams’ wild past from quitting Take That to partying with Oasis (Yahoo Entertainment)
And let’s face it, very few of us want to see a straightforward music biopic any more. In fact, the best example of the genre in recent years was 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, in which Daniel Radcliffe played the titular accordion enthusiast as a playboy badass who saved Madonna from the clutches of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
These music figures have lived their entire life in the spotlight, so it’s refreshing to see them take a more inventive approach to telling their stories on the big screen. And if that means Robbie Williams is played by a CGI monkey in Better Man, sign me up for an opening day ticket. Merry Christmas to us all.
Better Man is in UK cinemas from 26 December.
