The New Statesman

Hello, I'm Tom Gatti and you're listening to Culture from The New Statesman, a weekly podcast exploring the cultural moments that define our world.

Today we're delving into the dark machine of boy band fame in the UK, what this tells us about the country we live in and how things have

changed since the boy band mania of the 90s. But I want to start by bringing everyone's attention

to the new Robbie Williams biopic Better Man, which addresses some of the issues I've just

mentioned, but notably does so through Williams as a singing dancing monkey.

To talk about this, I'm joined by senior commissioning editor at the New Statesman, Anna Leskovich,

and writer Emma Garland, who has reviewed Better Man for the New Statesman.

Welcome both.

Emma, when you first heard about the central idea of this film that Robbie Williams was going to be portrayed by a CGI monkey, what was your reaction?

So my understanding is that Michael Gracie was interested in doing a film with Robbie Williams for quite some time before the sort of conceit of the monkey came into play.

And they were sort of doing informal interviews, sort of discussing Robbie's life and all

the kind of like stories that he has. And throughout those interviews, Robbie kind of like

referred to himself multiple times as a performing monkey or sort of like feeling like a performing

monkey. And it came up so often that Gracie was like,

okay, maybe this is the key to unlocking the whole thing.

I think that it allows you to see Robbie Williams as a person

kind of like a lot more clearly than if he was portrayed,

if either by himself or by a male actor,

I think the kind of almost facelessness of him.

Like there's so much to do with Robbie Williams that is like filtered through the media.

We have a very particular idea about who he is, what he represents.

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