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

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

In the grand retelling of his life, Robbie Williams wanted to be a lion. To be as strong, respected, and feared as the large cat tattooed on his right shoulder, or even as lithe as the tiger emblazoned on the front of his Rock DJ pants. “I was trying to find some self-worth at the time,” he says. “We all are, always. So I was like ‘I AM A LION!’”

Instead, in the gloriously bonkers musical biopic Better Man, from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, Williams is played not as the King of the jungle but as a clownish, CGI chimp.