Swinging good time

In a Robbie Williams biopic, the star is a CGI monkey

- NICOLE SPERLING

Dance, monkey, dance. Sing, monkey, sing. British pop star Robbie Williams has always felt like a performing monkey. He has described himself that way when remembering eras of his life: his days as a young boy, trying to prove to his father that he had the “It factor” required to become a star; when he was a teenager and landed his dream job as the fifth member of the boy band Take That; and finally as an adult trying to start a solo career.

Recent biopics of the band Queen and Elton John have proved that audiences are willing to taking a fantastical ride through pop stars’ common trajectories of rise and fall and rise again. But will they be so amenable when the protagonist is played by a computer-generated monkey?

Yes, you read that correctly. In the musical biopic Better Man — in Thai cinemas this week —the character of Robbie Williams is a chimp, although everyone else around him is human. It's a leap that director Michael Gracey, best known for the smash The Greatest Showman, is betting moviegoers will take, even those in the United States where Williams is hardly a name despite his international stardom.

The monkey, said Gracey, “was the thing for me that clicked, and it was also the thing that made the film near impossible to finance”.

His plan was to rely on the magicians at Weta FX (Avatar: The Way Of Water) in New Zealand to design a computer-generated monkey, something similar to the process that turned Andy Serkis into Caesar in the Planet Of The Apes franchise. For