Robbie Williams is releasing a big budget biopic later this year – only it stars him as a monkey?…

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Robbie Williams has always been a true popstar but he’s never exactly played it paint by numbers, which is why learning that his upcoming biopic features him as a CGI monkey sounds much less random than it would be coming from anyone else.

There have been countless big-budget movies about rockstars and famous musicians even in just the past few years – One Love about Bob Marley, Back to Black about Amy Winehouse, Elvis and even the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic – but there is a single one we could name where the star is a monkey.

Announced this week, BETTER MAN will tell the story of Robbie Williams’ life and career right up until the present day and is set to be released this festive period.

The first trailer has now dropped too and whatever you make of the concept, visually at least, looks pretty good – only time will tell whether it’s a good film or not.

The tagline for the film is, “Discover an extraordinary journey that can’t be told in an ordinary way” and as Williams addresses in the short teaser, starting by simply saying, “I know what you’re thinking? What’s with the monkey?”, they’ve certainly found a way to tell this story diferently.

In fact, although telling his story through the medium of a monkey wasn’t his idea to begin with and, as he and director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) told the likes of Heart Radio, there’s a few reasons for it.

First off, Robbie said of the film and its vision: “I want everything that I do from here on in to be slightly unusual, so that fits that narrative.”

“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.” That’s a fair point: a cute CGI monkey can definitely be rooted for, but it’s Gracey’s explanation that makes it sound most interesting.

As he puts it, the idea to make a furry version of the 50-year-old came from looking to reflect the hitmaker being “pushed on stage” like a “performing monkey” throughout his life, even when heavily under the influence of durgs and alcohol. But it goes much deeper than that.

The Australian director, who also headed up fellow pop music icon P!nk’s autobiographical documentary, goes on to explain: “He was always putting on a performance at [his hometown] Stoke for the other kids, at home for his parents.

“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.”

Robbie will be played and largely voiced by Chesterfield-born actor Jonno Davies via motion capture technology, not unlike that used for the Planet of the Apes films, with the story spanning his fractious childhood to boy band success with Take That and then solo superstardom.

Still one of the best-selling and most well-known pop stars to ever do it, he will naturally take full control of the singing sections in the film as well as provide narration.

As he put its himself in the voiceover we’ve now heard, “I’m one of the biggest pop stars in the world but I’ve always seen myself a little less… evolved”. The stylistic choice has certainly split opinion already, with some calling it a “fantastic” approach from a “working class lad” who made it. Others have only found the immediate humour in it thus far.

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Set to release on Boxing Day 2024, the blockbuster project from Paramount Pictures also features Steve Pemberton, Damon Herriman’ Raechelle Banno, Alison Steadman, Kate Mulvaney; Frazer Hadfield, Tom Budge and Anthony Hayes.

With a budget of a reported $110 million, the movie has actually already been debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and was met with pretty positive reviews, with The Guardian giving it four stars and labelling it a “surprisingly entertaining saga.”

As for us, we will say that we’d probably have watched a Robbie Williams biopic anyway, but let’s just say it being told through the lens of a monkey has very much piqued our interest.

There’s also another feature-length project still being made right here in Manchester that we’re very much keeping our eye on.

A new rom-com set in Manchester has started filming in the city centre
Luckily, the Robbie Williams biopic is out this year but we can’t wait to watch this one.

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Featured Images — Paramount Pictures/Drew de F Fawkes (via Flickr)