Beware of spoilers in this article

 

 

‘Fame is a drug like LSD’: Robbie Williams on success, sexuality and his simian movie alter ego

Michael Cragg The former Take That star has made a biopic, Better Man, in which he’s played by a CGI chimpanzee. He talks about sex, drugs and the traumatic madness of 90s pop

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/...1Do8ZyHiYMrqTRA

Edited December 13, 2024Dec 13 by Sydney11

Robbie Williams: I have to release my shame. It’s like a valve. It’s bleeding the radiators

 

 

Chris Heath

Sat 14 December 2024

 

Robbie Williams (pictured here in clothing by Dzojchen, and sunglasses by Nue Studio x Linda Farrrow) describes his new film Better Man as ‘a narcissist’s dream’ - Leo Baron

 

 

This evening in New York, at a boutique theatre on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a preview screening of Robbie Williams’ film Better Man is being held for an invited audience. Before the lights go down, the movie’s subject steps in front of the screen to say a few words. As has so often been the case throughout Robbie Williams’ career, what he says entwines levity and sincerity, and a self-importance forever puncturing then reinflating itself, in ways that can be tricky to untangle.

 

“I’ve been reliably informed you’re very important people,” he begins. “This is a very important moment in my life. And yours, as well – you just don’t know it yet. A lot of you are from America so you are not aware what a big deal I am. This makes me very sad.” (To be clear, whatever else he is doing, he is also playing much of this for laughs, and duly receives them.) “But if you’re with anybody from outside your country, just tap them on their shoulder, ask them about me. I’ve a storied history of stuff and achievement and s—t.”

 

This established, he moves on to saying something about the film itself. “So – you’re about to see a movie about my life. And it’s a narcissist’s dream. All the words coming out of the mouth of the guy are words I’ve said, experiences I’ve had, songs I’ve written, women I’ve slept with.” Then he offers one more crucial informative note. “And I don’t know if you’re aware, but in this movie everyone’s human apart from me. And I’m a CGI monkey.”

 

At this, there is a more uncertain ripple of laughter. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I know it sounds bats—t crazy, but it just about works.”

 

In an upstairs room is a table laid out ready, so that Williams can eat dinner and relax while the film runs, before returning for a post-screening Q and A session. But on the spur of the moment, he changes the plan. Instead, he takes a seat in the auditorium next to one of the guests, the actor Rufus Sewell. He’d rather watch his film again.

 

Williams has seen Better Man a few times now, but he still doesn’t know how it’ll go for him. The film’s conceptual strangeness aside (as he just mentioned, he’s a monkey), this is a much darker, weirder and more tumultuous spectacle than you might expect a pop musician’s biopic to be, and it’s his own past darkness, weirdness and tumult that’s up there. In September, when Williams had watched a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, he’d been sufficiently thrown off both by the film and the empathic acclaim it evidently received in the room that when he went on stage afterwards to answer questions, he was perturbed to find himself breaking down and actually crying.

 

For a few moments, he was quite unable to talk. Once he could speak again, he immediately started – in the spirit, one might note, of both the movie, and much of his wider life – to share with the audience what he was experiencing. “Yeah, that’s the thing about crying,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “You feel as though it’s never going to stop when it starts.” Just as typically, he then pivoted towards a deconstruction, both comic and accurate, of this unexpected moment’s pros and cons. “And I’ve got a film to sell!” he told the audience. “But Paramount will be going, ‘Yep! You’re doing it right now!’”

 

Still, that Toronto moment really did throw him a little. Afterward, he told me how unusual it was – he isn’t much prone to crying in everyday life – but also how he hated the thought that anyone might imagine it wasn’t sincere: “I don’t want people to think that it’s part of my shtick for the promo.” Furthermore, he was anxious that what had just happened might become a regular occurrence. “I’ve got s—tloads of premieres to do – I can’t be crying at every one of them,” he worried. “That was my fear: what if I’m broken mental guy at every premiere I do?”

 

To his relief, there’ll be no visible sign of “broken mental guy” this evening in New York. Certainly by the time the lights come back up and he takes the stage while his new song, Forbidden Road, plays over the credits, summing it all up – “You said you wanted all my secrets so I showed you all my demons/Do you love me now?” – he seems perfectly poised and collected. The post-screening chat is hosted by the singer Rufus Wainwright. After Williams has offered his own retrospective review of what everyone has just seen – “It’s basically 40 minutes of ‘I’m a cheeky Artful Dodger type and I’m from Stoke’ and then it’s an hour and 40 minutes of Trainspotting” – Wainwright asks him how he is feeling.

 

“I’m really, really excited,” Williams replies. “See, I’ve struggled with mental illness, and all the way through the most successful parts of my career, I couldn’t derive joy from them. There’s been a couple of decades, maybe a bit more, of just depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, dyslexia, dyscalculia – all the things we diagnose our friends with at dinner parties, I’ve got them.” But these days, he says, at last things feel different: “Through working on myself, through seeking help and taking help, and through the love of a good woman and four kids [his wife Ayda, and his children, are back in their house in London], and just growing up and maturing, I’m in the best place that I’ve ever been.”

 

Still, he points out, having a big-budget movie with your name on – that’s almost bound to raise the stakes once again. Earlier in the day, speaking to a different crowd who’d just watched the movie in a screening room, he’d put it like this: “Either it’s going to be massive… or it’s going to crash and burn. And I’ll end up in rehab again. It’s up to you guys! You want the monkey to go to rehab again or not? Say nice things!”

 

As his introduction at the New York screening acknowledged, Williams is significantly less famous in America than in most of the world. For a long time, he saw this as a blessing. When his fame, and all his life’s external and internal turbulence, was at its height, he moved to Los Angeles and escaped. “I mean, I genuinely think that I’m very lucky to be alive, and I wonder how much in part that is because I didn’t break here,” he says. “And there has been a safety that I don’t feel anywhere where I am famous.” But the less he has felt like he needed that safety valve, the more equivocal he has felt about his lesser level of success here. As he’ll tell one of his interviewers this week: “The great thing is: you can go to the local drugstore without being bothered. The bad thing is: you can go to the local drugstore without being bothered.”

 

He sees Better Man as offering him a belated second chance here, one he is enthusiastic about embracing. “I’d really like to show off for America now,” he says. “I’m ready for it.” He’ll spend this week promoting the film in New York and then Los Angeles, and I’ll listen to him give many, many hours of interviews. Even allowing for the codes and mores of Hollywood-land film interviewers, those he meets here seem genuinely taken by Better Man – again and again, unbidden, they explain that they have been back to see it two or three times, and testify to the tears it has induced. And as he meets them in person and offers them a crash course in the Robbie Williams way of looking at the world, with all its layers of honesty and self-immolation and irony, they seem pretty taken by him, too.

 

He’s good at this stuff. “I don’t hold anything back, and I don’t have the brains to know what to hold back,” he’ll say. “Fortunately, it’s worked to my advantage. I think people respond to the truth, in an age when there’s not much truth knocking about.”

 

“This has been a superpower of mine,” he’ll say. “I don’t know when not to tell the truth. I tell the truth, even when my truth makes me look like a bad person. But… I’ve also done enough work to not be a bad person, and be the best version of myself that I can be. Better. Man.”

 

Listening to the questions Williams faces as he promotes this movie, the general assumption seems to be that Better Man’s existence is the culmination of some hefty strategic planning – that a day came when he or his people decided that the time was ripe in his life and career to consolidate and amplify his success with a big movie biopic. But, in truth, there’s relatively little Williams has ever done, for better or worse, that has involved such naked strategising. It’s usually a combination of following his instincts and pure happenstance. And Better Man is a perfect example of this.

 

The first seed was sown, by chance, years ago when Williams went with his wife Ayda to a Los Angeles party hosted by the parents of her childhood best friend. Her friend’s father, Robert Wallerstein, is an entertainment lawyer, and Williams was chatting to one of his clients – an Australian visual effects whizz kid who was looking to direct his first movie. This was Michael Gracey. Gracey started acting out a film he then hoped to make, the tale of the Muppets creator Jim Henson. Williams was captivated. “I was beguiled by his ability to tell a story,” Williams remembers. “It was just: I want to see this movie right away.”

Sometime later, Gracey got back in touch, saying that he had a favour to ask. Williams has a very entertaining, set-piece version of what happened next, one that reliably brings the house down on the promotional circuit. Here’s how he told it at a post-screening event in Los Angeles, with Gracey sitting in the chair next to him: “I get a phone call from Michael Gracey, and he says, ‘Can I come round your house? I need a favour.’ ‘Yes, of course, Michael Gracey.’

He comes round to my house, goes into the studio, and he shows me the storyboards to the film called The Greatest Showman. And in my head, I go, ‘Yeah, all right, I’ll do it.’ And he shows me all these drawings and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it.’ And then he plays me the first song and I’m like, ‘That’s amazing!’ Second song, ‘That’s amazing!’ Third song, ‘That’s amazing.’” Williams acts out the answer he’s inwardly preparing for the inevitable question, and invitation, that he is expecting to come – “Of course – yeah, of course I will” – and continues: “And he goes, ‘And here’s the question.’ And I said, ‘Anything…’ And he said…” – comic pause – ‘Will you ask Hugh Jackman if he will play the lead in the movie?’

 

“Crestfallen, I was. Crestfallen.”

This version is clearly too good not to tell, though the version Gracey tells when he’s not sitting right next to Williams, while matching this one in some essential details – the house visit, the movie pitch, the request – is a little different. Gracey had actually been developing The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman for several years – it was Jackman who had originally brought the script to him – and they were nearing production. But Jackman was having last-minute cold feet about the strength of the original songs that had been written. During the development process, Jackman had sometimes invoked Robbie Williams as a reference point, and now, in a tight spot, Gracey came up with what might be considered a fairly fanciful and long-odds strategy. He would visit Williams, play him the songs, and then ask him to record a video for Jackman, attesting to their quality.

 

The way Gracey relates it, what Williams subsequently said off the cuff was far better than anything Gracey could have scripted – telling Jackman not just that Williams had been working on an album for a year and a half but would scrap that album to sing these songs, but that ‘if the two of us were drinking tea, I would bludgeon you to death with a teacup to be PT Barnum’. It worked, too: Jackman’s jitters were quelled, and The Greatest Showman was not just made but became a huge success.

 

In the meantime, Gracey and Williams stayed in touch. When they’d meet, Williams would tell – as he often does – remarkable, Byzantine stories of his past, and after a while Gracey had a suggestion. These stories were too good, and told too well, to just drift away into the ether. Why didn’t Gracey record them, he proposed, even if only for Williams to listen back to in a nursing home one day? Williams agreed to go along with this, and every now and then over the following 18 months, they would meet for a recording session. By the end, Gracey had recorded 12 hours of stories and memories. Characteristically, Williams says that he didn’t particularly overthink why they were doing this. “I don’t know why Michael would have been doing it,” he says. “But there must have been half an idea somewhere. I don’t know.”

 

Eventually Gracey came to Williams with the suggestion that there was a movie here. And sometime after that, he suggested that everyone else should be human, but that Williams should be played by a CGI monkey. Later, there’d need to be plenty of thinking about why this should be, and what it meant, but Williams swears that the truth is that long before any of that – before any explaining or rationalising, before Gracey had even finished his sentence proposing it – Williams was absolutely sure what his answer was: “Yes.”

 

It’s a constant irony of Robbie Williams’ career that, perhaps because he makes pop music for broad audiences, and leans hard into the tropes of entertainment rather than finding them something to disguise, people presume that his most important decisions are calculating and considered. Whether triumphant or otherwise, they rarely are. They are far more likely to reflect the mindset of a man who says “not everything has to be explained, or understood, or make sense”.

 

The trailer for Better Man that audiences see in Britain assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge on the part of those watching it. A realistic presumption. Inevitably, the American trailer needed to explain more. But when Williams was sent the initial draft of his proposed voiceover… well, he wasn’t thrilled.

 

I’m Robbie Williams! it went. I was one of the biggest pop stars in the world….

 

He remembers his reaction: “No! Not past tense, thanks. f*** off!”

 

Williams says he was perturbed more than angry (the tense was soon changed), but that he’s aware he’s now in a zone that claims all performers eventually - one where a proportion of the population assume that you no longer do what made you famous. “I am in that land, definitely perception-wise,” he says. “The ‘are you still doing music?’ kind of thing.” He relates a conversation he had a few months ago with a British man in Dubai, amiable enough until the man blindsided him with a question.

 

“Do you miss it?” the man asked.

 

“Miss what?” Williams countered.

 

“Singing.”

 

There was no easy way forward from there, so Williams just stated the facts

 

“I said, ‘Mate, I’m doing a world tour next year, I’m in stadiums. I’ve just finished a tour. No. I don’t miss it.’’’

 

Still, fame is ever-weird, and other changes have been noted, too, at least occasionally, in what the world perceives. And when they come along, the default Robbie Williams strategy tends to be some combination of trying earnestly to understand and analyse them, and to squeeze from the situation every last drop of amusement and absurdity they allow. Which brings us to the story of 22 June 2024: The Day Robbie Williams Wasn’t Recognised.

 

On that particular day, he and Ayda were meeting some new friends for lunch. They dressed up smartly, and headed off. On the way there, it turned out that the traffic was all snarled up (there was a climate change-related protest in central London), so Ayda suggested they get out and walk. Her husband reminded her what a bad decision, based on all previous experience, this would be. “I said to her, ‘Robbie Williams? In a pink suit? In London? Walking? You mad?’” But after lunch, there was simply no choice at all. If they wanted to get home, they would have to do so on foot. So out they ventured into the Saturday streets, bracing themselves for what would surely follow.

 

Except that things didn’t go as expected.

 

After a while, it all seemed so very strange that Ayda got out her phone and started filming what was happening. Or, rather, what was not happening.

 

“So this is very concerning,” Robbie commentated, glancing at the lens as he walked. “I’m dressed completely in pink. I’ve got pink sneaks on. I’ve got diamanté sunglasses.” He got to the point. “Absolutely nobody has recognised me, or bothered me, and I really need them to.” He stood there, in fully visible Robbie Williams mode, as people walked past. “It wasn’t like this in the ’90s,” he muttered.

 

‘It wasn’t like this in the ’90s’: Williams fondly recalls the experience of no longer being recognised in the street... even in a pink suit - Leo Baron

In a second video he lay on the grass next to a pathway, to equal indifference. In a third he bought an ice cream at a stand where, absurdly, the radio was playing “Let Me Entertain You”. Nothing. (To add to the surreality, all of this was taking place in Hyde Park, where two weeks later he would play a sold-out concert to 60,000 people.) In a fourth video, he was finally approached by a French woman who asked for a selfie. “Back in the game,” he announced, with muted triumph.

 

These videos were posted on Instagram. Then, the next day, he went out again, with Ayda once more filming, this time wearing a shirt with ROBBIE WILLIAMS on the back. “I wanted to see whether that was just a moment in time that was odd or whether that’s my new reality,” he tells me. “Because my reality since 2003 is: it’s not safe out there for me. And maybe now, awkwardly, it is!” This second experiment was a success. Or, I guess, a failure, depending on which way you look at it. In that he was recognised. In that he was able to confirm, he says, “I’m still Robbie Williams.”

 

All of this is ridiculous, of course, and in the videos it’s clear that he knows as much. So I guess one could try to argue that he is serving up a brilliant satire of narcissism, self-obsession, and egotism, rather than embodying these qualities. But I’m not sure it’s quite that straightforward either, or that he would even try to claim or accept that. For on one hand, as he points out: “We’re poking fun at my own ego. We’re letting you in. Because if it really was just egotistical, it wouldn’t be for public consumption. I wouldn’t publish the results.” But on the other hand what he wrote on Instagram at the time showed he was well aware of the irony in finding himself “actively welcoming and seeking the thing that I’ve spent the last 30 years desperately hiding from” – and then, of course, aware of the further irony of immediately sharing the whole experience with his 3.1 million followers.

 

And he’s too honest, and too interested in describing the actual contours of his reality, even when not necessarily flattering, to pretend that the initial experience hadn’t truly rattled him.

 

“I got to feel what it felt like – I didn’t like it,” he says of his blip of anonymity. “That genuinely affected me. Not a joke… I was worried. Because I’ve got so much wrapped up in Robbie Williams being Robbie Williams.”

 

The monkey that is Robbie Williams is created by Wētā FX, the New Zealand digital effects house behind The Lord of the Rings and Avatar movies, and is mostly based on motion-capture footage of a young actor, Jonno Davies, though Williams’ body was filmed for some scenes too. Gracey says that the eyes are Williams’ – “incredibly high-res scans of Rob’s real eyes’” – and that much of the monkey’s voice in the finished film is taken from the original audio of his interview with Williams.

 

It’s uncannily effective, but it nonetheless became clear, as the film neared release, that the world might require a more explicit explanation of exactly why Williams was a monkey, beyond it simply making some kind of grand intuitive sense. In service of this, both Williams and Gracey would describe in interviews another part of that initial discussion where Gracey asked Williams what his spirit animal was. Williams’ first answer was that he was a lion (‘I was trying to find some self-worth for myself,’ he says), but when Gracey indicated that this was the wrong answer, Williams immediately hit on the “correct” one: monkey.

 

Gracey says that Williams talked in their interviews about feeling like a performing monkey, and Williams argues that this choice makes sense of how he always felt: “I’m other. I feel like I’m something else.” In general terms, Williams also points out that despite “the luxury of centuries of technology and where we find ourselves”, it makes plenty of sense to depict him as not so far removed from who we have all evolved from. “I’m in a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel,” he reflects, “but let’s not forget, we are cavemen. I’m just wearing Gucci.”

 

Anyway, once you see the movie, these kinds of questions fade away. As improbable as it may seem, it simply works. You might think that the lead character being a monkey in a world of humans would be never-endingly distracting, but in fact somehow the opposite is true. It beckons you in. Later, trying to figure out why it works so effectively, I realised that often what’s much more distracting in other movies like this is that a part of your brain is forever monitoring how an actor is succeeding or failing to represent a famous figure you think you know. Somehow the monkey takes that off the table.

 

Williams recalls that he didn’t ‘overthink’ the creative process of the film, during which Gracey recorded 12 hours of stories and memories

There is another way, too, as Michael Gracey has pointed out, in which telling the story through a monkey counter-logically – because of “the empathy we have for animals and watching animals in pain” – actually makes it easier, not harder, to feel the human story being told. “I think we’re very cinematically numb to seeing human suffering,” Gracey reasons. “But when we see an animal hurting, there is something very uncomfortable about that.”

 

Historically, movies telling stories about musicians with their involvement are obliged to have a heroic sheen. Here again, Better Man, to its credit, may not be what people expect. Hero moments do arrive eventually, but the movie its subject describes as “the greatest hits of my trauma” spends most of its time elsewhere. “I think there may be a heart to this movie that is missing from a lot of biographies because people are scared,” Williams suggests. “I think where other people are sanitising their biographies for the sake of the intellectual property, I don’t have the sense to do that. I’m not a good guy in this movie. I know people feel for me in this movie, but I’m egoic and wrong, all the way through, really, till the end.”

 

To tell the story in this way, Gracey plays fast and loose with chronology and various real-world facts – and interposes some dazzling surreal episodes – and yet the end result convincingly conveys a really specific, sometimes near-unbearable emotional truth.

 

“All of it felt that way,” explains Williams, noting that it’s important “for the general public to know that, of course, it’s cinematic, and of course, there are tricks, but they’re not being hoodwinked. Like I say: that’s how it felt.”

 

One morning, Robbie Williams awakes in his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow and heads out on foot, across Sunset Boulevard. He has another full day’s schedule promoting Better Man ahead of him, but before that, he wants to have his photograph taken in a public toilet. To properly explain exactly why… well, we need to go back a few years, when Jason Williamson, singer with the caustic, rambunctious Nottingham group Sleaford Mods, tweeted about something which was irking him: If I look at Robbie Williams in a photo for too long it sends me into a rage.

 

“Some people can slag me off,” says Williams, “and I get deeply wounded and retaliate.” Truth is, in some circumstances, he’s truly world class at nursing a grudge. Now and then, he will bring up a throwaway condescending comment that some snooty musician made about him in the 1990s as though he’s no less angry about it than on the day it was said. But it very much depends on who’s doing the condescending. With some people, his fury knows no bounds. “Other people,” he points out, “I’m just really proud they know who I am.”

 

So it was with this Jason Williamson barb. “Because I was really into the Sleaford Mods before – I was an early adopter,” Williams explains, “I was like ‘Wow, Jason from the Sleaford Mods knows who I am!’ It’s like when Morrissey said, ‘I think everything about Robbie Williams is fantastic, except the voice and the songs.’ I was just ‘Awww, Morrissey knows who I am…!’”

 

So, in response, Williams simply retweeted Williamson’s original tweet along with the reply Rage? I can never get past shame. #goals x.

 

That opened a door. He and Williamson subsequently exchanged emails and began to intermittently chat. And it was with Williamson, last year, that the toilet idea first came up. “He was thinking about doing some art while he was on tour,” says Williams, “and I had this idea for him where he just draws all of the toilets that he visits, for no other reason that it’s funny. And I sent him one of me on the toilet in Latvia.”

 

But then, when Williamson didn’t seem to embrace the concept, Williams decided to do it himself.

 

In recent years Williams has done about two thousand drawings, mostly on his iPad: typically some kind of image combined with text, veering from scabrous and coarse to wry and witty, from scattershot and surreal to empathic reflective. (A recent landscape folded into the words: “I want all of the attention and at the same time none at all.”) He’s quietly serious about it – most of the images he makes public appear on Instagram, but in the past year he has also had gallery shows in Amsterdam and Barcelona. Sometimes he does a series of related drawings, and that’s what the toilet images have become.

 

Despite his initial reticence to reveal his art publicly, Williams has enjoyed two successful solo shows in Amsterdam and Barcelona this year - Moco Museum Amsterdam

He posted the first cache of these images – Toilets of the Summer 2024 – in September: it included drawings of himself on a toilet at Heathrow airport, in a rented villa in Provence, in Tahiti, in Amsterdam’s Conservatorium hotel, in LAX airport, and on a plane “somewhere between Monaco and Zurich”. These images aren’t salacious or obscene, just rather surreal. Their creation, however, does require a certain weird etiquette issue. As he fashions these images by drawing over photos on an iPad programme called Procreate, each image requires a photograph of him in situ, and so those in his orbit are sometimes requested to help, with understandably varying degrees of discomfort.

 

Staying here at the Beverly Hills Hotel offers a particular opportunity for the ongoing Toilets of the Fall 2024 series, one he feels unable to spurn. Just south of here is Will Rogers State Memorial Park, within which is a toilet that has a highly charged place in pop iconography – it was here that, in 1998, George Michael was arrested by an undercover police officer for performing a “lewd act”. That’s where Williams visits this morning – today with an actual photographer friend in tow for a very brief photo session “and to see the scene of that moment”. But he doesn’t linger: “I don’t want to be arrested before my film comes out.”

 

Back in his hotel room, a package has arrived with his name on.

 

“Are you expecting anything, Rob?” he is asked.

 

“No,’ he says. Deadpan pause. “Apart from a knighthood.”

 

Williams says there are ‘tricks’ in the events depicted in film, but the public are not being ‘hoodwinked’ by the emotional truth it conveys

Many of the American interviewers almost seem taken aback by just how much Robbie Williams will share, and how readily. In one interview, he is praised for how he’s managed to open up. But he rebuffs the premise. He points out that, for him, that’s the easy part.

 

“I’m not closed!” he retorts. “I’m open 24 hours a day! This isn’t hard for me. This isn’t brave. This isn’t any of those things that people are saying.”

 

Later, back in his hotel room, he laughs wryly about how regularly he is credited with bravery for his willingness to unveil what is going on inside. That’s just not how he sees it.

 

“This is f—king breathing for me,” he points out. “This is easy. I don’t know why. And it’s only when it’s pointed out that it’s unusual, I go, ‘Oooh, is it?’ I think it’s braver and dumber to not be so revealing. And more self-harming to not air the dark corners of your life. I suppose if you’re experiencing shame, like I do, you want to release the shame. It’s like a valve. It’s bleeding the radiators. I enjoy bleeding the radiators because if I get it out there, it’s not in my head.”

 

I suggest to him that for a lot of people, if not most, shame feels far more threatening when it’s out in the world. Their shame seems bad enough when it’s just in their own head, but to actually have it out there, seen by other people – that’s what’s truly horrific to them.

 

He considers this.

 

“Not me,” he says.

 

Better Man is in cinemas across the UK on December 26, the film’s official soundtrack will be released digitally on December 27. Robbie Williams will tour the UK, Ireland and Europe next summer; robbiewilliams.com

 

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/robbie-williams-r...k5Lqa07qBli2zft

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2024/12/1...n-shame-monkey/

Edited December 14, 2024Dec 14 by Sydney11

Thanks Tess -good read.

]@1868595663648481714

 

 

Zoe Ball experiences emotional moment with Robbie Williams

 

Zoe Ball, British broadcaster, has left her listeners buzzing with bittersweet emotions as she recently hinted at a big career change during an emotional chat with Robbie Williams.

 

Last month, the 54-year-old left her fans shocked by announcing that she's now stepping down from hosting in Radio 2's Breakfast Show after six most successful years

 

During their recent interview with BBC Radio 2, Robbie wished Zoe well for her future endeavors as she talked about her new exciting chapter of life.

 

"Oh and by the way, congratulations to you on your service to entertainment" the singer began.

 

He continued, "I know this is not the end completely for you."

 

"Or is it? I'm taking up gardening. I'm going to work in a garden centre," Zoe further quipped.

 

However, Robbie went on praising the star for her work and said, "Well I just want to say thank you for your services SO FAR to the entertainment world, to BBC Radio 2, to all that have gone before you and will come after you, but to you in particular."

 

Listen to interview with Jonno & Robbie in link below @ 1:38:45

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0025v0m

Edited December 17, 2024Dec 17 by Sydney11

Primal Instinct: Jonno Davies on portraying Robbie Williams in ‘Better Man’

 

In ‘Better Man’, Robbie Williams' life story is told through an unlikely lens – that of a chimpanzee. Meet Jonno Davies, the man tasked with bringing primate Robbie to the big screen.

 

When Jonno Davies was cast as Robbie Williams a mere five days before cameras began rolling on Better Man, the rising British star immediately knew that his first leading role on the silver screen would be quite unlike any other. Becoming a household name and having your face plastered on billboards tends to be less of a worry when you’re portraying a British icon as an actual walking, talking monkey.

And yet, this is the barmy premise that forms the heart of a blisteringly original biopic from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, which takes tired tropes and spins them on their head. In it, the winner of The Film Award at the Rolling Stone UK Awards 2024, you’ll see a monkey racking up countless lines of cocaine, but you’ll also see said monkey leading a dancing troupe down Regent Street to the strains of ‘Rock DJ’.

 

“It’s been a blessing and a curse,” says Davies, reflecting on the part when we meet in a London hotel in late autumn. “I just got to be genuinely me and focus on the why of the role rather than the how, and that was beautiful.”

 

It helps too that this primate-based version of Robbie was brought to life by Wētā FX, the technical whizzes who pioneered the motion capture technology that was used on films such as Avatar and, most notably, on Lord of the Rings. Unexpectedly, there’s even shades of the latter film late on in Better Man, when Robbie’s Knebworth performance descends into a broken-bottle and fist-fuelled battle that gives Helm’s Deep a run for its money.

 

For Davies, there’s a fortuitous full-circle moment to it all too. Before landing this role, he had been seen in supporting roles in shows such as Amazon’s Nazi-slaying series Hunters, but the cut-throat nature of the industry meant that he would often deliver entertainment gigs at parties to make ends meet. He’d play a variety of characters including Marvel’s The Hulk, Captain America and, most interestingly, The Greatest Showman’s PT Barnum.

“I literally did a Greatest Showman party a month before I got the film, wearing the red coat and coattails and it was a great job — it meant I didn’t have to do a bar job,” he reflects. “But somehow, I ended up working with the director of that very film and it came at a time where I wanted to act so much. I was given this role where you’re allowed to perform and it’s about being truthful to this huge character that is Robbie Williams.” Here, Davies talks in more detail about his part in the film.

 

I spoke to Robbie in 2022 and he said it was a “blood and guts” biopic. Having now seen it, it’s exactly clear what he meant. It really doesn’t hold back, does it?

It’s warts and all, and I think that’s what makes it really special. I think that’s credit to Rob, really, that he’s allowed that side of him to be seen in such an honest way. I think he could have easily said no and painted himself in a much more favourable light. But, you know, as well as being the hero, he’s also the villain of our film. I think that’s what makes it so watchable because it’s so unpredictable. You don’t know what he’s going to do.

 

Were you a fan before you took the gig, or an observer of Robbie from afar?

I saw him with my mum and dad at Milton Keynes Bowl when I was a kid, and he was in his classic black vest and jeans. He was just this rock star, you know, and I thought it was amazing. I think it was one of my first ever concerts, and an outdoor one is different too. I think there’s something even more raw and aggressive about it. I’m a massive fan, and ‘Angels’ was my karaoke song.

He was probably one of the reasons why I wanted to be a singer when I was younger, because I had a failed audition for X Factor when I was 14 or 15. That ended that dream, so I thought I’d go back to acting!

 

How did you react when Michael Gracey told you that Robbie’s story would be told through the guise of a walking, talking monkey?

I was definitely bewildered, because you go “Oh? You’re telling a story that a lot of people know, but you’re making him a monkey?” From the base of it, I didn’t understand, but then I saw the pre-vis and I started to understand it artistically, what it allowed them to do with the musical numbers and take them into a fantasy land. It’s a great way of representing something when words just aren’t enough — like any good musical.

The more I spoke to Michael too, I had this realisation that the monkey is the idea of the audience seeing Rob the way he sees himself, that reflective viewpoint and the idea of being a performing monkey, which is rife in celebrity culture at the moment. People see the celebrity and although we have this strange access to their lives, we’re still disconnected from them and we’re not empathetic. We can often think, ‘You might have mental health issues, but you’re rich and you have a million followers on Instagram.’ I think Michael wanted to bridge that gap; he wanted people to feel what Rob was feeling.

 

Did you get the chance to properly inhabit that mindset then?

Well, I was actually brought to the movie about five days before it started shooting. I was the last person to come onboard because they had a really hard time finding Robbie, and Kate Mulvaney, who plays my mum in the film, recommended me to Michael. We’d been in Hunters on Amazon Prime, and we never did any scenes together, but she showed Michael my theatre work, including A Clockwork Orange, where I played Alex DeLarge. Our version of that was very physical theatre and a lot of bravado. It was a very different project in one sense, but there’s almost a shared thread too. Michael saw that and thought there was something worth exploring. But in the end, I was flown out to Australia where it filmed without knowing if I had the role. That was the most nervous flight of my life…

 

You flew out without knowing if you had the role?!

Yeah, but I thought this had to be a good sign. ‘They’re not flying me out there with the intention of saying no, but they still haven’t offered it to me. Am I packing my clothes for three months or am I packing my clothes for three days?’ And ultimately, I decided to go with the latter because I thought the heartache would be too much if I’d unpacked all my stuff and then was told I was going home. What was amazing about that though is that Michael told me directly I’d got the job. Often when you do these things, it goes down the chain to your agent and to you. That’s lovely, but it’s great to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth when you’ve done an amazing day of auditions and danced with the boys who played Take That. But it was a life-changing moment. There was certainly relief but also an overwhelming feeling of ‘Oh, God, I’ve actually got to do this now.’

 

Do you see yourself and Rob as kindred spirits? What was it like meeting him for the first time?

I can certainly feel connected to him and even more so since meeting him. I see now what a family-orientated man he is and what a genuine and generous man he is. But the first time I met him, I had a camera attached to my head, [i was] wearing the CGI pyjamas, and it was in Melbourne on this huge sound stage that had been created specifically for the film. We were about to run through ‘My Way’, and I don’t sing in the film, but I had to sing for filming so it looked like that was the case when they added the vocals. Suddenly, the door gets kicked open, and in Mr R Dubz strolls in, plonks himself in the front row, and it felt like he was saying, “Let’s see what you’ve got.” I shat myself! I thought I’d butchered it, but we really connected from that point.

 

How open was he about his experience of addiction and his mental health?

He is very open about his addiction, and even now I think it helps him to be that way. He’s also obviously very lucky to have a wife and a family that really do care for him now. They want for him rather than want from him

But he was open, he said he still would have probably been an addict without fame. He’s just got a much easier access to [drugs]. And I think he would have still spiralled into really dark worlds of depression and self-hatred, even without the drugs.

But again, it just accelerates it. And what he told me was when he realised that he could not say no, that’s when he realised how bad things were. When it was the end of the night and there was only one way it was going.

 

What was Robbie’s first reaction to the film?

I think he was extremely grateful to Michael for doing such a good job. Because as an artist I imagine you go, ‘I’ve given up so much of myself here. What if it’s not very good? You know, I can’t take that back.’

He was grateful for the audience reaction at Telluride Film Festival, where we premiered it, too. That might sound narcissistic, but it’s not; it’s that constant worry that you’re not enough. So, for people to see those sides of them and yet still give it a standing ovation and say, “Wow, you’re a f***ing rock star,” I think was really humbling.

 

Going back to what you said earlier about celebrity culture, do you think the film could take on a deeper meaning with the audience in the wake of Liam Payne’s death?

Yeah, totally, and I think people sometimes say that drugs are a common trope of biopics. But there’s a reason why this happens, and you do see it a lot. It’s the pressure-cooker environment of it all, and I think that’s only going to get worse. Imagine if Robbie had been at his dark stage during social media? God knows what would [have happened].

But I’d hope that this film might change the way people perceive celebrities. Even just a per cent or two, because I think what Michael’s done really well is shine a light on the man behind the fame and what people go through when they are famous. The armour they have to put on in order to just survive. So, I hope people can come away with an increased sense of empathy.

 

What impact do you think this film could have on your career?

It just came at a perfect time for me because Hunters had come out just before Covid, and I had my visa for America ready to go. I didn’t have my son at that point, so I was able to be a bit more of a free-flowing bird.

But after Covid, when me and my wife started talking about a family, it makes you realise that acting isn’t just about chasing a dream, it has to be about chasing an income. I was a kids’ entertainer for so long, all the way from when I left drama school to getting Better Man. I was Hulk, Jack Frost and I literally did a Greatest Showman party a month before I got the film, wearing the red coat and coattails and it was a great job — it meant I didn’t have to do a bar job. But somehow, I ended up working with the director of that very film and it came at a time where I wanted to act so much. I was given this role where you’re allowed to perform and it’s about being truthful to this huge character that is Robbie Williams.

 

I’ll always be thankful to Kate Mulvaney for recommending me after we worked on Hunters, and my team and my wife just had faith in me and they believed that it would come. So yeah, I’ll always be very grateful for this, I think, no matter what happens [in] the rest of my career.

 

https://www.rollingstone.co.uk/film/feature...nterview-46190/

Edited December 17, 2024Dec 17 by Sydney11

French TV

 

Reverend & The Makers on their charity Christmas single: “The Samaritans helped me, so I should help them”

 

 

Jon McClure tells NME about the personal impetus behind festive single ‘Late Night Phone Call’, why he does private shows for fans on Christmas Day, his ADHD diagnosis and past jealously of old flatmate Alex Turner, the new era of the band, and his “f***ing genius” new friend, Robbie Williams

 

 

Speaking of Tom Grennan, you went to the premiere of Robbie Williams’ film Better Man with Tom and The Lottery Winners. How have you become mates with Robbie?

 

“He appreciates the band and Day Fever. He’s a f***ing genius, one of the most emotionally intelligent people I’ve met. I could listen to Rob for hours on end.”

 

Are you doing anything professionally together?

 

“There are no concrete plans, but we’ve talked about a bunch of stuff. I’m just happy to have him in my life. If Rob worked on the bins like my cousin Tom does, I’d still want him in my life for the same reason I want Tom in my life: he’s a class dude, who’s kind, intelligent and thoughtful.”

 

What effect has your recent ADHD diagnosis had on you?

 

“I understand myself better. When I was 24, I thought I knew everything and I’d gob off to NME about everything. I knew f*** all. Looking back, to when I was kicking off at people, I was probably quite poorly for most of my career. I wasn’t well mentally. If you add drugs into that, plus my best mate [Alex Turner] being in the biggest band in the world and feeling jealous of him, it was a bad mix.

 

“Now I understand myself, ADHD is like a special power I’ve not known how to harness before. I’ve got four unfinished novels, which are all class as ideas, but I’ve not known how to finish them until now. I storyboarded the ‘Late Night Phone Call’ video, I’m Day Fever’s CEO. With everything before, I’d think I’d better get someone else to finish something.

 

“I’m 42 and it’s like I was infantilised until now. In my case, before being diagnosed, ADHD left me taking a lot longer to grow up and be responsible. Now I have, I feel I can do anything.”

 

 

Where does that leave Reverend & The Makers’ new music?

 

“I’ve unlocked a style that really suits me. I’m making the music I’d listen to as a fan. When I put Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield or Philadelphia soul on, it’s like I’m transported into a realm of class music. It’s timeless, and I’ve found a way to do it in a Sheffield accent.

 

“It’s not like I’m sat at home listening to Sam Fender, The Reytons or Gerry Cinnamon. I respect all the indie artists who are smashing it, but that’s what I listened to as a teenager.

 

“I’m in a different place creatively. What I’m battling against is preconceptions. If people go: ‘Why the f*** would I want to listen to a Reverend & The Makers album?’, I totally understand that feeling. But if they do listen now, it’s: ‘Oh, you’re that guy now? Fair play. It’s good, innit?’ If that takes four more albums to get across, that’s OK as my life is great.”

 

‘Late Night Phone Call’ is out now on Distiller. Reverend And The Makers headline Rock And Roll Circus Sheffield on August 30. They also appear at Kendal Calling and Rock And Roll Circus Norwich.

 

https://www.nme.com/news/music/reverend-the...illiams-3823461

Edited December 18, 2024Dec 18 by Sydney11

Imagine keeping the letter all these years & he shows the actual letter at the end of the clip :heart-old:

 

 

@1869486384999702935

Edited December 19, 2024Dec 19 by Sydney11

A surprise guest on The Overlap :cool:

 

 

@1869686723124269482

 

 

@30.51

 

 

 

 

Edited December 19, 2024Dec 19 by Sydney11

Imagine keeping the letter all these years & he shows the actual letter at the end of the clip :heart-old:

@1869486384999702935

 

This is so sweet -what a lovely thing to be able to do. :wub:

The interview with Robbie for Variety.

It starts on 1:04 hour.

 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5xO8aqds4Pkbhy11Hv37Kb

 

BACK TO SCHOOL All my life I’ve felt really stupid – so I’m going to resit my GCSEs to prove I’m not a dumb-dumb, says Robbie Williams

 

Robbie with the Suns Clemmie Moodie

 

AGED 16, he was plucked from the classroom and rocketed to superstardom. Thirty-five years later, Robbie Williams is gearing up to go back to school — and sit his GCSEs. If, that is, he can fit in his studies around a best-selling world tour and awards season.

 

Robbie — whose latest single ­Forbidden Road, from his new biopic Better Man, is up for Best Original Song at next month’s Golden Globes in LA — has been busy Googling home education options.

 

He says: “I’ve been wanting to set up a university but, actually, I wouldn’t be able to attend if and when I do, because I didn’t get any GCSEs. “I got nothing higher than a grade D, and everything else I failed or I didn’t turn up for. I really want to go back and get them.

 

“I can’t remember my English teacher’s name, but I was thinking there might be an interesting TV show in it, where I have to go back to school . . . but obviously in an age- appropriate way! “All my life I’ve felt really stupid because we didn’t know about ­dyslexia in the Seventies and Eighties in Stoke-on-Trent. “I’ve got dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, but we didn’t have those then, so I left school thinking I was a dumb-dumb and it’s taken ages to get over that. “And now I just wanna go and prove a few people wrong — I’m not thick. Now that I’ve said that, I’m s***ing myself . . . maybe I am!”

 

It’s good, innit?’

 

For the record, Robbie Peter ­Williams is one of the brightest — and most talented — celebrities out there. He may not have an A in ­trigonometry, but he’s ­literate, erudite and street-smart. Earlier this year, he had his first solo art exhibition at the prestigious Moco ­gallery in Amsterdam, two years after his acclaimed exhibition with Ed Godrich at Sotheby’s — and now his track Forbidden Road is being feted in Hollywood. So that’s his Art and Music GCSEs sorted, then.

 

Of the Golden Globes nod, he adds: “Yeah, it’s good, innit?” Which doubtless will delight his future English teacher.

 

Anything else to add, Rob?

 

“It’s so weird because you can be sort of cynical and judgey about award ceremonies . . . up until you have something that’s drastically important. Then it’s the most ­important thing ever.” The star’s biopic has also received critical acclaim after its world premiere at Colorado’s Telluride Film Festival in ­September. Directed by Greatest Showman ace Michael Gracey, it tells Robbie’s story in a way never done before — via a CGI chimpanzee.

 

The singer appears as the ape, and the film shows dad-of-four Robbie’s ­meteoric rise from his time in Take That through to solo success — but also everything in between, including alcoholism, drug addiction and his rampant womanising.

 

It’s just brilliant.

 

Heartbreakingly, the film also details his doomed early relationship with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton, showing the aftermath of the abortion she was encouraged to have by her record label at the time. Today the pair are still firm friends — Robbie sent her the film script to make sure she was happy, and Nicole ­was on the red carpet for the London premiere last month.

 

Another person given an advance read of the script was Robbie’s old Take That pal Gary ­Barlow, but the reaction was . . . muted. And Robbie invited his former bandmates to a special screening of Better Man but, alas, only Mark Owen turned up. Robbie and Gary famously fell out after Robbie quit Take That in 1995, and Gary later claimed his younger ­bandmate was jealous of his solo career at the time. But they later made up, Robbie briefly reunited with Take That in 2010, and they are now good pals.

 

Robbie said: “I sent Gary the script and, yeah, it was problematic. “You have these tools to prolong your career and remind people that you still exist — you know, movies, books, documentaries. But part of that deal is talking about the past and how it felt. “And it’s very difficult for Gary, and very difficult for me, because I have to tell my story authentically. I need to, I’m compelled to. But at the same time, in the film I speak and feel and think how I spoke, felt and thought back then. And I don’t think that way now. “This will be triggering for Gaz and I feel guilty for that. But also I’d feel more guilty for me if I didn’t tell my story. “Gary said that he’d come off worse than Darth Vader in the first Star Wars, so we changed some of the script. I hope it’s OK.”

 

Of the semi-shunned screening, a pragmatic Robbie simply shrugs.

 

Chatting in his dressing room at the BBC studios in West London ahead of a Graham Norton Show TV ­appearance, he adds: “So, Mark emailed me a few weeks ago. “He said, ‘Hey, me and the lads are all in town. Can we go see the film?’. But only Mark turned up. He loved it, though. It’s all good, it’s all good. “Seeing it will be tough for Gaz. Howard [Donald] won’t be bothered and [famously reclusive] Jason [Orange] is probably working for Mossad now.”

 

Close to Liam Payne

 

The Robbie of old may have been hurt, angry or bruised by Gary’s no-show, but 2024 Robbie is a whole ­different beast.

Sobriety for more than 20 years, nauseating happiness with his US actress wife Ayda Field, therapy, a blissful life in Los Angeles (and ­London and Switzerland), plus four delightful kids have made him, well, a better man. Indeed, eldest daughter Teddy, 12, is with us during our chat and is a joy — politely saying she remembers meeting me at their home in Los Angeles last year.

 

No nepo-baby brat there.

 

Away from stage and screen, ­Robbie had a smash-hit four-part ­Netflix series out last year — and it proved he is genuinely one of the nicest men in showbusiness. When, a couple of years ago, I mentioned my now ex was a super-fan, out of the blue he and Ayda posted a Christmas package including a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne, some chocolates, a handwritten card and three pairs of gym socks [clean!] from Ayda’s athleisure range.

 

(I’m at the same address, Rob, for all future ­bottles).

 

And after fellow singer Liam Payne died in ­October, Rob rang me to check in. Really, it should have been me making sure he was OK. Robbie, after all, was the late One Direction star’s mentor on The X Factor. The pair were close, and Robbie helped the younger singer throughout his career, including when Liam tragically battled his own drink and drug demons. He doesn’t want to detail how he helped, though, out of respect for the family. Unquestionably, Liam’s death in Argentina, at the age of just 31, shook the Angels singer. It was, as he says, a “sliding doors” moment. He adds: “Any of those moments in my life where ultimate chaos was being achieved by me — because of the powders and potions and what I was putting into myself — it could so easily have been me so many times. “I feel like I should do something in the way of mental health. “I want to gather around some like-minded people in the industry and say, ‘What can we do?’. “Progress is being made, though — because at least we’re talking about things and at least we accept that these things happen and they are real and not a figment of ­people’s imagination. “I think the idea of safeguarding industries is all great when it comes to big institutions like the BBC or ITV or Channel 4.

“But there are more people at grass-roots level trying to make it than there are people who have made it. “So that’s maybe where we can step in and do something.”

 

And if anyone is likely to do ­anything, my money is on Robbie.

 

https://www.thesun.ie/tvandshowbiz/14408652...ams-ayda-field/

Edited December 23, 2024Dec 23 by Sydney11

What I've Learned: Robbie Williams

 

Robbie Williams is one of the most successful recording artists in the history of the U.K. He first rose to fame as a member of boy band Take That before launching a solo career. A semi-autobiographical movie about this life, Better Man, opens in select theaters on Christmas Day and nationwide on January 17. Williams, 50, lives in Los Angeles and spoke with Esquire in New York City in November.

 

I did a residency at the Wynn in Vegas, and because North America is not acquainted with what I do pervasively, I had to sell myself to the people who book the acts. I was like: Mate, I’m a swear-y Frank Sinatra with tattoos. I’m in these stadiums doing these massive shows, but people at dinner parties are asking me if I still do music. I feel as if I’m a brand-new artist again, and I’m about to experience my business in a way I didn’t the first time around because of mental illness and drugs and shit.

 

I played the Artful Dodger in a play when I was younger and got a standing ovation every night when I came on. It was intoxicating. I wanted whatever that was. Dad and Mum split up when I was four. Mum kept the records: Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. That was my library.

 

For my ninth or tenth birthday, my sister bought me two records: Pink Floyd The Wall and a collection of electro music. I didn’t get Pink Floyd at all, but this electro stuff was like Oh my God, I want to eat and drink it. So the music I heard growing up was a weird mixture of Glenn Miller and Afrika Bambaataa.

 

My nan taught me what real unconditional love looked like. Without her, I wouldn’t know.

 

I learned how to charm a room from my dad. He worked on holiday camps—the closest thing you’d get in America is the Catskills, but it’s a trailer park. I learned that a life in the entertainment industry was possible.

 

I learned how to work from my mum. Real work looked real depressing, because my mum worked all the hours that God sent her. The way my mum moved up out of her economic background—the wife of cannon fodder—to owning her own shop is equivalent or bigger than what I’ve achieved.

 

You spend the second twenty years of your life sorting out the first twenty years of your life.

 

I left school when I was sixteen with no qualifications, nothing higher than a D. If I had been good at math, my mum would’ve pushed me to be a mathematician. As it happens, I was good at showing off, so my mum pushed me in my showing off capabilities. I’m good at getting eyes on me.

 

If I was born in the creator generation, I’d have been a YouTuber. I didn’t even dream of music. I auditioned for a boy band, Take That, and got in. So this life in music has happened by mistake. There were five boys all vying for position in life and the industry. We all loved each other, didn’t trust each other; were friends, but weren’t friends. And then at home, there was a two-grand contract on my head to kill me, from local people who could do that. It was because of jealousy. Hood shit. Literally a hundred girls would book themselves in a hotel to be with me. This is not normal, so my idea of sex and my sexual relationship with women is warped.

 

Whatever happens when you get the bends is what happens when you become famous. I don’t know how much a pint of milk is. It’s not my fault. Leonard Cohen wasn’t a pop-song writer; Thom Yorke isn’t a pop-song writer. Those are the things I wanted to write. What innately comes out of me is pure pop. I can’t help it.

 

What was the first time I missed !

 

When I released a single called “Rudebox” in 2006. I was in the middle of a massive mental breakdown. When you miss your first shot after not being able to miss, it can buckle your confidence. You can have an existential crisis, which I tend to do. I don’t think I’m a musical genius. There is a never-ending supply of melody that I find very natural. The tapper hasn’t turned off, touch wood.

 

How do you write a pop song !

 

Practice and get lucky. That’s it. I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. If you can write a song, you can be Elon Musk.

I’ve come up with an idea for my own hotel. I’ll do the design for it. Why can I do that? Because I can write a song. That same creativity can also choose bedsheets and wallpaper. That’s not confidence; that’s knowing that I can do it.

 

I used to be able to sing track seven off the album and the whole stadium would know it. These days I can sing the first single and the stadium don’t know it. It happens in everyone’s career. I don’t like that.

 

In my particular line of work, it’s not about you; it’s about them. I don’t want to get up and do the same songs every night, but I also want to facilitate the best evening possible because people have paid good money to receive that.

 

Money isn’t the top of the mountain, and the top of the mountain isn’t the top of the mountain. When you get to the top of the mountain in any profession, you have an existential crisis because it didn’t fix you.

 

Fame won’t fix you. Success won’t fix you. Purpose kind of fixes you.

 

Money gave me the ability to sit on my sofa with a cashmere caftan on, growing a beard, looking like a murderer, smoking weed, watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and looking for UFOs in the evening. It made me lazy. But it also gave me enough space for me to realize, man, you need to do something with your life. I was thirty-two.

 

No f***ing way I was having children; I have, it’s been the making of me.

 

What have I learned from marriage? That I can keep my cock in my pants. I thought that was impossible. So far so good.

 

When my first kid, Teddy, arrived, it was terrifying for so many different reasons. I couldn’t look after myself. How on earth was I going to look after a precious soul?

 

There were like 375,000 people at Knebworth, which is like giving birth to 375,000 Teddies. Jesus. Existential crisis. Why are all these people here? What does all of this mean? How am I going to fill this stage? It’s only me. I don’t see what they see in me.

 

I made my legs walk to the stage when my legs didn’t want to walk to the stage.

 

The biggest experience of my life right now is being the captain of the good ship Williams. But I’m not overwhelmed by it now because of experience.

 

This might be incredibly wrong and sick, but there’s something to die for other than my wife and kids, and it’s the job. I don’t know why I find that empowering, but I do.

 

The job has given me a creative output that is probably saving my life and helping my mental illness.

 

I feel as though I’m about to get lucky again, and this time I’m grateful and happy. I’m wide-eyed. I’m new again.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ive-lea...-110000097.html

Edited December 23, 2024Dec 23 by Sydney11

 

 

 

Rob is so funny & he looks gorgeous in pink :heart: :heart: :heart:

:cool:

 

 

View this post on Instagram

Edited December 23, 2024Dec 23 by Sydney11

Not only about Better Man, so posting it here.

 

Behind the 'Better Man': Robbie Williams on life, loss, and mental health

 

 

English singer and songwriter Robbie Williams, famous for and , is a professional attention seeker, at least that is what he tells the media. It is what a career in the creative industry entails — having the eyes on you. And if not, then you're not doing your job very well.

 

As someone who is really ambitious, Robbie has not stopped wanting or needing attention. In 2023, Robbie found the spotlight through a Netflix documentary on him. And now, as we get closer to 2025, a new biopic on the singer is here. , directed by Michael Gracey (), portrays the rise, fall, and resurgence of the British pop superstar.

 

Ahead of the film's release in the UAE, we caught Robbie at the red carpet of the UAE premiere and a roundtable in Dubai Mall's Reel Cinemas on December 29. He opens up about his deeply personal journey as captured in , his role in the film, and how physical fitness, too, plays an important role in one's mental wellbeing.

 

Watching one’s life unfold on screen is no ordinary experience, and for Robbie, it has been a mix of heartbreak and healing. Having watched it 11 times, at screenings and premieres, now, Robbie is in a place where he has completely made peace with everything on screen and enjoy being with people experiencing it for the first time.

 

"At the start, though, it was different," he shares. "Watching scenes on a computer — the death of my grandma, my addiction, my relationship with my father — it broke me. But now, I see it as a film, a very exciting film, and a fortuitous moment in my life.”

 

The film’s raw portrayal of his struggles with addiction, personal loss, and fractured relationships forced Robbie to confront parts of his past he might have preferred to keep buried. Yet, it’s this honesty that makes so impactful.

 

But did he learn something new about himself? "No," he says, "but I learned that I’m a different person. It was very dark, but I knew that. I’m in a different part of the journey now. I’m at the other side, thank God.”

 

One of the film’s intriguing elements is Robbie being portrayed as a chimpanzee while everyone around him are shown as humans, a decision that captures his unique personality.

 

“I’d like to see myself as a lion, but I’m not. I’m cheeky, silly, irreverent, and naughty,” he explains. “I’m not alpha or beta—I’m a monkey. When Michael Gracey asked me about my spirit animal, I first said lion, trying to find some self-worth. He questioned that. So I said, ‘Monkey?’ He agreed. There’s vulnerability in monkeys, and they’re more human than humans in many ways.”

 

Robbie’s faith in Gracey’s vision for the film was unwavering.

 

“I just got out of the way of Michael. He is a genius, and you’ve got to let him do what he’s going to do. So I didn’t have any notes,” he admits. “I didn’t say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Leave more in, make it more gory, make it more real, make it more authentic,’ and he did exactly that.”

 

A recurring theme in Robbie’s life and the film is his battle with depression. While he’s made tremendous strides, the journey continues.

 

“I’ve been really good for quite a long time, and now I trust that tomorrow will be as good as today,” he says. “But I did have a dark moment five days ago — worrying about the film, back in a place of self-loathing, anxiety, and dread. It was all expectation-based and fear-based, as depression often is. But it passed. For me, it’s a lifelong battle.”

 

Robbie credits his family, a stable home life, and medication for helping him stay grounded. Robbie and his wife Ayda Field are proud parents to four children.

 

“I got married and I think that responsibility for me is very important to have. I was running away from responsibility when I should have been running towards it,” he reflects. “We have a very happy home and we both have purpose. Everybody's route to finding sanity and a way out of darkness is very different but I suppose very similar. All I know is the older I've got, the happier I've become.”

 

While mental well-being is a cornerstone of Robbie’s recovery, he also acknowledges the role of physical fitness.

 

“I’ve been working out more consistently than I ever have for a year, and yes, it’s amazing. You know, if you work out, you feel better. There should be podcasts about that,” he quips.

 

On his visit to Dubai, Robbie expressed his admiration for the city and its people.

 

“It feels like a land full of opportunities, and this is the place to make dreams reality,” he says. “Obviously, I love my fans—I’m not getting anywhere without them.”

 

For fans eagerly awaiting new music, Robbie has good news.

 

“Yes, a new album will likely release in April or May, depending on how the film does,” he shares. “My biggest hits have come from pain, but I’m not going back into misery to write a song.”

 

https://www.msn.com/en-ae/entertainment/cel...id=BingNewsVerp

Edited December 30, 2024Dec 30 by Sydney11