Most people don’t know it, but Robbie Williams is a major reason why The Greatest Showman exists.
Michael Gracey, who directed that 2017 movie, says English pop star Williams was Hugh Jackman’s main inspiration while playing the ringleader at the center of The Greatest Showman. “During all of production, his reference time and time again was Robbie Williams,” he says.
But just before filming began, Jackman was so full of doubt about the movie’s songs that he nearly pulled out of the project. So Gracey, through his lawyer, found Williams’ number and called him up. He showed him the songs for the film and begged him to help convince Jackman it was worth sticking around for.
Even though Williams didn’t know Gracey, he did just that. “He literally said that he’d been working on an album and he would ditch that album to sing these songs – that’s how good these songs were,” says Gracey. “And he then went on to say that if Hugh wasn’t going to play the part, he would play the part.”
“I think it was how I’d bludgeon him with a teacup,” interrupts Williams.
Jackman stayed on The Greatest Showman – which became a massive box office hit, earning $435 million worldwide and an Oscar nomination for best original song – and Gracey and Williams formed a friendship that would last years. Through their conversations about Williams’ path to fame, Gracey thought there might be a story worth telling in a film. So he asked Williams if he could record their conversations, and ended up with 18 hours of tape. “Rob has the art of storytelling in spades, and I also couldn’t believe that he remembered so many details about a life that was so fueled on drugs and alcohol,” says Gracey.
Those tapes became the backbone of Better Man, the Robbie Williams biopic that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday. The Paramount Film is in some ways a traditional biopic that traces Williams’ childhood days, tough family life, rise to fame in the boy band Take That, massive solo career, and battles with drugs and alcohol. Gracey has interwoven some of Williams’ most iconic songs – including “Angels”, “Feel,” and “Rock DJ” – into the story for soaring musical numbers, and he also added one other major twist: Williams’ character is played by a CG monkey.
It sounds like a wild gamble, but Williams and Gracey say this was the best way to capture Williams’ deep self-loathing in the film. Gracey noticed in the interview tapes that Williams often described himself as a monkey when he’d be pushed to perform onstage, even when he was barely conscious because of the drugs and alcohol. In a sit-down interview with Vanity Fair just moments after the world premiere, the pair reveal why the singer had to be a monkey for the whole movie and how Williams is still chasing fame (in America, anyway).
Better Man
Ben King
Vanity Fair: It’s just 20 minutes after the world premiere of your movie. How are you feeling?
Michael Gracey: I loved it. I loved feeling people around me, the little things—laughter and gasps and all that. But actually the thing I really pick up on the most is the silence. There are certain moments in the film where you can hear a pin drop, and there’s no crackling or moving or shifting of people in chairs. The moment of silence isn’t happening just on screen. It’s happening in the space, and I think that’s really something unique and powerful.
Robbie Williams: Well, I’ve got a massive itch to scratch, because I really want to show off in North America. So this is all matter of joys for me, genuinely. Just to be here in North America, in front of Americans, starting my show and our process once again feels really good.
Why are Americans such a target to you?
Williams: Because I made a decision quite a long time ago that I would live anonymous here. I was promoting an album, and I had a bunch of money in the bank and sold a bunch of records, but I was deeply unhappy. And the adult driving the car decided, “we live here, we don’t work here.” I can be Bruce Wayne here and then Batman everywhere else—but also the idiot in the back is egoic. That ego really has an itch to scratch here, and wants to prove to myself that I can do something meaningful here.
I’ve lived in California for 24 years, and there is a certain privilege that membership gives you to the celebrity fraternity that I don’t have in LA. They sort of know that I mean something somewhere. And with that, they sort of give me a pass, but it’s ego and access. And it slightly annoys me – more than slightly. I need to walk into a room and then go, “Wow, okay.”
When did you realize you’d want to film this in such a unique way?
Gracey: To see himself as a performing monkey wasn’t just whilst he was famous – it was his whole life. He was always putting on a performance at [his hometown] Stoke for the other kids, at home for his parents. And it made it so powerful for me because I was like, “you’re going to fall in love with this character, this little monkey. And you’re going to invest emotionally in this little monkey.” As long as you set that contract at the start of the film, you’re in, and you will go with that monkey through the entire journey.
What did you think when he brought up the monkey?
Williams: “Amazing.” Straight away, yes. Because I want everything that I do from here on in to be slightly unusual, so that fits that narrative.
There must have been people backing this movie that thought that was pretty risky.
Gracey: Yeah, those people didn’t back the film [laughs].. It was some of the shortest meetings I’ve ever had in my life. They’d of course go, “Director of Greatest Showman, Robbie Williams – we’re going to make a fortune.” And I go, “Yeah, just one thing. Rob’s going to be a monkey.” And they go, “What?” And literally that was the end of the meeting. One person said, “But if this whole monkey thing doesn’t work out, you can just go back to Robbie.” And I go, “No. No. There’s no going back. We’re going to be shooting a guy in a gray suit with dots on his face. There’s no going back.” So then that person stepped away. It was a lot of people who said no. And also the monkey concept meant that the budget of the film doubled.
The CG looks incredible. It’s easy to get emotionally attached to this monkey.
Gracey: We were so fortunate to be trading off three films that [visual effects house] Weta had already done for Planet of the Apes. So all of the knowledge that they’d learned, and if you watch those films, they really do progress, each one.
Williams: As humans, we care more for animals than we do for humans. So the audience is probably going to have more empathy for me as a monkey than they would’ve done for me as me.
Do you worry about fans expecting to see Robbie in the movie singing these songs?
Gracey: No, because I do think there’s multiple groups of people. There’s people who are Robbie fans, and they’re going to the film anyway. And even if they go, “I want to see Robbie,” you just go, there is so much of Robbie in that monkey. If people know Robbie, if they really know him, they’ll know that they are Rob’s eyes staring out at you. There are so many of Rob’s expressions all the way through that film. There’s so many mannerisms and the way that Rob moves—that has been a study by Jonno Davies, who did the performance for Rob. But also Rob did a whole bunch of motion capture. He did a full motion capture. And there’s a million Easter eggs: the clothing, even in some of the flash frames, there’s nods to the music videos that he did. There’s so much stuff in there for the fans.
Paramount kept this film pretty secret. They didn’t release a trailer or even mention the monkey ahead of this debut. Were you onboard with that?
Gracey: Yeah, and I think, look, now it’s out in the world—but I do love the fact that people are meeting it for the first time, and it becomes something special. We can’t really talk about the film without bringing up Jonno Davies because Jonno, he did such a deep dive on Rob and Rob’s movement.
Williams: He absolutely smashed it.
When it comes to the way your family is portrayed, especially your difficult relationship with your dad, how protective were you over that?
Williams: The most that I felt the most protective of was my dad, because it’s a consolidated version of it. My dad’s my hero, so it is very difficult to go, “Hey, Dad. You don’t come over that great in the movie.” So that was tough. And that was the biggest concession that I made to the movie that I didn’t feel comfortable about was I’ve got to throw my dad under the bus to make it work. But after some negotiations with my dad, he signed the paper, and he’s okay. But it’s tough.
A lot of this story is about your relationship with fame, and your struggle with that. Is your relationship different now?
Williams: Yeah. There’s levels of fame, and there’s levels that aren’t as quite lucrative, but really manageable. And then there’s really fucking biggest artists in the world that is completely unmanageable. And you can be overwhelmed by it, of course. And you can not be able to deal with it in any way, shape, or form. And you could become ungrateful and cynical, which I did. And I think once my first child arrived and it wasn’t about me anymore, and purpose set forth into my life, that’s when my whole relationship with fame changed.
And it changed even more just recently. We were walking back from a restaurant in Hyde Park, in London, and nobody fucking recognized me! And it fucking terrified me—absolutely terrified me. Because everything that I want to do, which is whole heaps of things – build universities, build hotels, have my own cruise liner – all is facilitated because I’m famous, and this is my purpose. This is what I want to do. These are the things that I want to create. And in that moment, I realized what it felt like to not be famous and to not have those possibilities. And I have been even more grateful after that moment.
Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.
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