Dance, monkey, dance. Sing, monkey, sing. The British pop star Robbie Williams has always felt like a performing monkey. He has described himself that way when remembering eras of his life: his days as a young boy, trying to prove to his father that he had the “It factor” required to become a star; when he was a teenager and landed his dream job as the fifth member of the boy band Take That; and finally as an adult trying to start a solo career.
Recent biopics of the band Queen and Elton John have proved that audiences are willing to taking a fantastical ride through pop-stars’ common trajectories of rise and fall and rise again. But will they be so amenable when the protagonist is played by a computer-generated monkey?
Yes, you read that correctly. In the coming musical biopic “Better Man,” the character of Robbie Williams is a chimp, though everyone else around him is human. It’s a leap that the director Michael Gracey, best known for the smash “The Greatest Showman,” is betting moviegoers will take, even those in the United States where Williams is hardly a name despite his international stardom.
The monkey, said Gracey, “was the thing for me that clicked, and it was also the thing that made the film near impossible to finance.”
His plan was to rely on the magicians at Weta FX (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) in New Zealand to design a computer-generated monkey, something similar to the process that turned Andy Serkis into Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. For “Better Man,” the stage actor Jonno Davies wore the gray motion-capture suit for the entire production and was then rendered into simian form. For the chimp’s face, the eyes of the actual pop star were used.
This approach not only doubled the budget of the movie, but also seemed just too far afield for most backers. Multiple times, Gracey said, “I would sit down with financiers. They would say, ‘Director of “The Greatest Showman,” Robbie Williams. I couldn’t be more excited about this. How much do you think?’ And I would say, ‘Well, there’s just one thing: Robbie in the film is being portrayed by a monkey.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, yes, in some dream sequence, or he looks at his reflection and he sees himself as a monkey.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, the entire film.’ Their faces would just drop and they would say, ‘OK, well, this is the end of the meeting.’”
Gracey spent six years and all his political capital from the massive success of “The Greatest Showman,” which earned $435 million worldwide, to cobble together the money to make this fantastical musical featuring Williams’s music catalog. The film premiered Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It will next appear at the Toronto International Film Festival in September ahead of its nationwide release from Paramount Pictures on Christmas Day.
Williams, with his cheeky personality and self-described “punchable face,” was all aboard the monkey concept, Gracey said. “He grinned from ear to ear” when it was first presented to him. “He thought it was just so crazy that it was going to work,” he added.
And so from the first frame of the film to the last, Williams is portrayed by a monkey, first as a young childlike one with furry paws and outsized ears who doesn’t fit in at school and is desperate for the approval of his showman father; then as a rebellious boy-band monkey with dyed blond hair (just on his head) and a penchant for copious amounts of cocaine and alcohol; and finally as an adult monkey desperately trying to fight off his demons.
To Gracey, the gritty rendering of Williams’s life is made more heartbreaking with the monkey at the center, a helpless animal that he’s betting will elicit sympathy from the audience.
“I genuinely believe you actually feel more because he is a monkey,” he said. “When you watch a monkey doing drugs, it’s actually really hard to watch. We show it in a way that is messy — it makes you uncomfortable, and it’s meant to.”
Gracey explained that the character was self-medicating instead of dealing with anxiety and depression, trying to numb himself, and then fighting back. The film “doesn’t hold back the extreme condition that he was in mentally at that stage of his life,” the director added.
Paramount, which has been developing another original musical with Gracey since 2021, was given an early look at the film and took to it immediately.
“I had no idea what I was really going to watch,” said Brian Robbins, co-chief executive of Paramount Global, who watched an early, unfinished cut of the film last November with his film team, and ended up spending $25 million for the North American rights. “I think even before the lights came up you could feel this sort of energy,” he recalled. “When someone does the unimaginable, it’s the most exciting thing in this business. I think ultimately, that’s what audiences want to experience and we experienced that firsthand — which with a jaded group like ours, is kind of hard.”
Two years ago at the Cannes Film Festival, Gracey showed 20 minutes of the film to his loyal cadre of financiers, and he brought Williams with him for the introduction. Gracey spoke, but all eyes were locked on Williams. And it was in that moment that Gracey felt that he was onto something with this grand anthropoid experiment.
“That’s what the monkey does. It’s the truest depiction in a film of what it is to be a star, because we all just stare at the monkey,” he said, adding, “They walk into the room, they don’t open their mouth, and everyone is staring.”
Williams, now 50, has sold 77 million albums worldwide and won 18 Brit Awards, the English equivalent of the Grammys. Yet, in the United States he is virtually unknown. This movie may change that, at least when it comes to his music. But he may still get away with walking down the street in New York or Los Angeles without being recognized.
To Gracey, drawing moviegoers completely unfamiliar with Williams will be the clearest mark of success.
“The people I really want to see this film are the people who have no interest in Robbie Williams,” Gracey said. “That, to me, is the truest victory. That is where the monkey transcends the narrative.”
Read More: In a Robbie Williams Biopic, the Star Is a C.G.I. Monkey. That’s Right.
