2025 is the Year of the Monkey — that is, if you're Robbie Williams. In actual fact, if you follow the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the Year of the Snake, which portends prosperity and success. This also rings true for Williams, who — if the adoration on the interview circuit around the world (as he promotes Better Man, the biopic about his life) is anything to go by — is more popular than ever.
It was the director of the film, Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman), who came up with the idea to use CGI technology to portray the pop star's life through the guise of a chimp. “We understood that we needed a creative difference,” said Williams, who admits that his life actually isn't all that different from other famous stars whose shenanigans have been covered in the genre — absent dad, attention-seeking child, low self-esteem, meaningless sex, piles of drugs. “We needed a USP, a unique selling point, you know? Yes. Because the biopic genre covers a lot of famous lives and we've seen them now, and we get it. We needed to get people talking, and I think we have with this movie.”
Being portrayed as a monkey wasn't Williams's ideal, though now that the film is getting rave reviews he's happy to admit that, “To be honest, I've always been a little less evolved.” He also says that he sees himself as a performing monkey, so his characterisation, then, is just right. He has that incredibly charming cheeky grin and an irresistible irreverent playfulness that's so perfectly performed in the famous, controversial video for one of his big hits, Rock DJ (2000), which encapsulates his audacious sense of humour and the complex, self-deprecating derision of his own fame, while he simultaneously revels in the attention that his “showman” personality commands — he's clearly making fun of people who'll do anything to get attention, including himself.
The video is a mixture of footage of the singer performing a strip show for an elevated DJ, combined with visual effects that made the vision of director Vaughan Arnell and Williams possible. In it, after stripping to his tiger-bearing bikini briefs, Williams takes them off too, grinning at the gorgeous model/DJ before ripping off his skin, and “seductively” throwing his butt muscles at the roller-skating sirens circling him, which they suggestively bite into. Finally, having revealed all, and stripped down to the bone, his skeleton manages to lure the DJ into a dance.
The video is a precursor to this wild ride of a film, released 24 years later, only this time the monkey avatar allows Williams to reveal himself in a less obvious way. Initially Williams wanted to be portrayed as a lion, an image of which is tattooed on his right shoulder, or even as the tiger (his Chinese zodiac animal) emblazoned on the front of his Rock DJ underpants, but Gracey tapped into the singer's simian spirit instead. Williams says: “My monkey mind was in control of a great deal of my life, unfortunately. And he's fun to be around, but he's also destructive and hard work. You can't keep up with it because that monkey mind will take you to the grave.”
The film covers the narrative arc of Williams's life from his humble beginnings in the English town of Stoke-on-Trent, where his dad abandons the family to seek his own minimal singing success, to getting his big break at 16 years old after successfully auditioning for the boy band Take That. There's temptations and vices aplenty, invigorated by superstardom — drugs, drink, shallow sex — leading to mental issues, lack of self-esteem, a “dark-night-of-the-soul” depression and his eventual phoenix-like rise to redemption, all the while constantly being in the public eye and making top-selling albums — by 2008, Williams had sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history. With more than 80 million album sales worldwide, he's one of the best-selling artists of all time.
Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian wrote that Williams is “a perfect meeting of ego, self-deprecation and hits”, adding “there really is nobody else, in pop music anyway, who combines monumental hamminess and bone-deep vulnerability quite so effectively”.
When I asked him if he felt nervous about revealing so many personal detail about his life in the film, he said: “I'm constantly in a state of promoting one thing or another, and while I'm promoting one thing or another, I've been asked to relive all the most difficult parts of my career and my life. So there's not much difference really. It actually works in a therapeutic way. As a human (especially those born on the 13th of February, 1974 — I don't know if you're the same) I want be seen, I want to be heard and I wanna be understood. I want to know myself wholly.” He added, “I don't want to be delusional and I don't want blind spots. I also want to be able to represent myself in the most authentic way, even if that takes [being] a monkey.”
The film isn't the first attempt as a very public exploration of the star. In 2023 Netflix released a documentary series called Robbie Williams in which he explores the difficulties he's had dealing with fame, with, as critic Dan Einav puts it, “A mix of sadness for the mental anguish endured, shame for the self-destructiveness indulged and pride in the hardships weathered.”
Again, in Better Man, Williams confront a fair amount of self-loathing and lack of self-worth. How does he overcome it and keep on performing? “You overcome it by a series of trials and tribulations that you either rise above or you let sink you. But I'm also really resilient. I won't be beaten,” he said. “My particular path was drinking and drugs and you realise, or I realised that was killing me, so I had to take evasive action. When you take evasive action from a spiritual, physical and mental malady, you have to learn how to put things in the right places or you die. I had to go on a quest to learn about myself, so myself didn't kill me.”
Williams admits to knowing he had a problem at 19 years old — he went to his first AA meeting at 21 or 22 years old, he recalls. Now, at 50, he's been married for 14 years and has had four kids. “I realised — because I do have some emotional intelligence — that I needed to change my ways, or else I was going to die. I decided I wanted to be alive and I wanted to be a better man.”
Williams produced and narrated the film. He says he gave the screenwriters Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey the go-ahead to explore his darkest moments. But whether chimp or human, Williams has the kind of effusive charm that makes everything he does forgivable. Jonno Davies is the ape performer under the Wētā FX motion capture and he nails the Williams moves, impetuousness and vulnerability to perfection, while the monkey conceit allows us not to be distracted by the actor and the singer's physical differences. “I got face and body mapped for the film,” says Williams. “Yeah, the monkey reminds us that we're really only animals. We're primal, but we have technology and hot and cold running water, which lulls us into a false sense of security to believe that we're not savages. But we are. We're a sum total of our unconscious animal mind.”
In the process of making the film, Williams says he discovered what he already knew, even before the documentary. “I'm incredibly ambitious, and these are the tools I need to utilise to propel me for the third act of my career,” he said. “I also realised that I've shed an awful lot of the person I used to be and now I'm somebody different and I like this version of me much, much more. We know so much these days, more then we ever knew in the 90s and early noughties. We're getting more knowledgeable about mental health — where to go and what to do. Just know this — it took me a couple of decades to fight through my issues and now I'm at the other end and it's beautiful. There's beauty at the end of that struggle and it feels remarkable.”
The film releases in South African theatres on Friday January 24, and the mega pop star will be in the country to perform and promote it.
I asked him what he's looking forward to about this concert and coming back to entertain his South African fans? “The weather, and a chance to apologise for leaving it so long? Oh, yeah. I've been dealing with some form of mental illness or another, which has added spanners to my plans. I hope you understand. But now I'm coming back. I'm looking forward to experiencing it this time in a more sober mind, probably for the first time as a fully fledged, well-rounded human.”
Finally, how would he like to be remembered? “As somebody who is still a viable commercial option,” he jokes. “No — as a kind, vulnerable person.”
Better Man opens in cinemas on January 24. Williams will be performing in Cape Town on January 22 at the DHL Stadium and in Johannesburg on January 25 and 26 at the Sunset Casino. Click here to book tickets.
Read more about Robbie's career and achievements here.
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