When it came to playing superstar singer Robbie Williams in the new musical biopic, Better Man, Jonno Davies faced challenges. There was the motion-capture suit that was skintight, revealing, and made him feel alien—was also his sole costume in a film that transforms the English actor into a monkey.
Then there was the role itself: The animal is a visual metaphor of Williams’ life as a performer uncomfortable in his own skin, which presented yet another challenge for the man playing him. So much of the movie is about Williams’ struggle with simply being on stage, something that has never been a problem for the ebullient Davies.
“The thing I found most difficult is when Robbie told me how he genuinely hated performing,” he says during a visit to the Bay Area when Better Man screened as the centerpiece of the Mill Valley Film Festival.
“It got to a point where he feared it. It made him feel so small and terrified. I come from a theater background, and part of the performance that I’ve always loved is having that interaction with the crowd and that kind of instant response and feeling the atmosphere in the room. So, to know that that he suffered from those feelings, I think that was probably the biggest hurdle to overcome.”
The man to make a monkey out of Williams and Davies is Australian writer-director Michael Gracey, who got his start directing music videos before making his feature debut in 2017 with the P.T. Barnum musical biopic The Greatest Showman.
In his approach to Williams, he wanted to get away from the standard biopic and he had heard the singer refer to himself as a “performing monkey.” The more Gracey thought about it, the more he realized that Williams was someone whose public persona was a virtual mask, whether on stage in front of a crowd, just singing for his dad, or simply tooling around his hometown Stoke-on-Trent as a sensitive kid pretending to be tough.
“I thought that would be just an amazing conceit, if we could represent him not how we see him, but how he sees himself,” Gracey says.
To get Williams on board with such an audacious plan, the director led off by asking the singer what he considered to be his spirit animal. “Lion” was Williams’ immediate answer, although he quickly admitted with a big grin that he was just kidding. To Gracey’s relief, after thinking about it for a few minutes, Williams decided his spirit animal really was a monkey, allowing Gracey to make his pitch.
Better Man isn’t solely focused on Williams’ insecurities, but they play a big part as the film tells the story of a boy abandoned by his father Peter (Steve Pemberton), who leaves to chase his own show-business ambitions. The son’s success, which begins when the teenage Williams joins the boy band Take That before exploding like a supernova when he goes solo, far outstrips his dad’s dreams.
But Robbie can never enjoy it. Williams doesn’t believe in himself, and that lack of confidence plays out in substance abuse, meltdowns, and other self-lacerating misbehavior, while on stage he lives in constant fear of being found out as a fraud.
Not that Better Man is depressing. Gracey is nothing if not a kind of greatest showman himself and he fills the screen not just with Take That and Williams’ hits but also with scenes like a big musical number set in the heart of London where the whole street comes alive with acrobatic dancing. The director’s style is a throwback to the kind of musicals Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen used to make at MGM back in Hollywood’s Golden Era, a charge to which Gracey happily pleads guilty.
“I know I was born in the wrong era. I mean, I should have been in the heyday of MGM. I would have killed it,” Gracey says.
“I love musically driven narratives. I always say that musicals happen when you get to a point emotionally where words no longer suffice. So, you want to have people go up to a moment of pure joy and ecstasy, and the only way they can really express it is through song. And the opposite is true when in the depths of despair, when words no longer serve you, you sing and if you can do that, it gives you goosebumps. It’s so powerful. I love it as a form of narrative expression.”
It was in those musical moments that Davies finally understood Williams and his discomfort with performing. The actor began from a standpoint of euphoria to be performing among and before a big crowd. (In addition to dancing, Davies sang all the songs on set, though it is Williams’ vocals that appear in the film.) But filmmaking is repetitious, and Davies became a performing monkey himself in take after take, robbing him of his joy in performing.
“I started to get it,” he says. “We were doing 50-60 takes on some of those musical numbers. I started to get how Robbie felt. Once you’ve given so much of yourself, you’re running on fumes. That’s when it can get really rough, but you have to turn on that showmanship and make that connection with the audience.”
BETTER MAN opened in Bay Area theaters Fri/10.
