Let’s address the simian in the room. Yes, in his new biopic Better Man, Robbie Williams is depicted as a walking, talking chimpanzee. And no, the human Robbie never appears. It is all chimp, all the time. Think Bohemian Rhapsody if it was set at a zoo. Or Planet of the Apes with extra Gary Barlow. But it had to be this way, insists Better Man’s director Michael Gracey, whose previous film was box-office phenomenon The Greatest Showman.
“I think you feel more for an animal suffering than you do a human,” Gracey tells me, with characteristically Australian enthusiasm. “There’s nothing glamorous about a monkey doing cocaine. It’s actually a bit sad and uncomfortable. You’re just like… ‘I don’t want to see him doing that’.”
