How “Better Man” pulled off its crowd-pleasing Regent Street number — after the Queen's death nearly derailed it all

When you listen to Better Man director Michael Gracey speak about the challenges of pulling off one of his film's most complex numbers, you realize it's a miracle it came together at all.

For the Robbie Williams musical biopic's rendition of "Rock DJ," the Britpop star's 2000 hit song, Gracey planned to shut down Regent Street, one of London's busiest tourist hotspots, for four nights. His envisioned sequence involved 500 dancers; choreographed cameras, buses, taxis, and motorized scooters; pogo sticks; costume changes; and a segment involving a giant bubble gum machine he wanted to pull off since making 2017's The Greatest Showman (seen in the clip above).

"The amount of times we went down there at 3 in the morning and danced down the street with our iPhones and having drunk people yelling at us, 'Is that for TikTok?!'" Gracey recalls, mimicking the belligerent catcallers. "It was such a buildup to that number. There was so much preparation that went into it."

Related: How Britpop star Robbie Williams, as a monkey, got the Greatest Showman flair for his biopic (exclusive)

The "Rock DJ" sequence happens fairly early in Better Man, which tracks the life of Williams but portrays him as a monkey. Williams, wearing a performance-capture suit, plays himself as a primate as an adult, but for the Regent Street number, those duties fell to Jonno Davies, who plays the monkey-fied Williams as a younger man. The song drops once Williams and his bandmates of the '90s group Take That land a record deal and hit the streets to celebrate.

Gracey couldn't rehearse the sequence directly on Regent Street. That would have cost additional money they didn't have to shut down the businesses and foot traffic. "We had to go into a huge studio space and literally tape out each section of Regent Street that we were going to be dancing down — every bus stop, every curb, every rubbish bin," the filmmaker says. "We had to do a one-to-one rehearsal so that we could work out where everyone was going to be at what point in the music."

The plan was to go right from that week of rehearsal into filming the first of four nights on location to keep the moves fresh in his team's minds. And then! "When we got to the end of the week, a producer came up to me and said, 'The Queen died last night. We're not shooting,'" Gracey recalls. "We got shut down literally the day before we were about to start filming."

Related: Robbie Williams, as a monkey, tells his story from boy band fame to solo infamy in Better Man trailer

Queen Elizabeth II died on Sep. 8, 2022, at the age of 96. As is customary in the U.K., certain events had to transpire. "There's nothing you can say. It's 10 days of mourning, then they had the funeral, then they had the coronation," Gracey lists. "It took us another five months to get back onto Regent Street. And just so you know, there's no insurance for the death of the Queen. We had to go and raise that money again. People on the producing side were like, 'Well, you don't really need that number.' I'm like, 'No, no, no. We definitely need this number.'"

And so they did. They raised the funds again to pay the shops to shut down, they dusted off the mental cobwebs on the choreography, and went to work. Suffice it to say, Gracey adds, "Regent Street was definitely the most stressful of the musical numbers."

You can see the fully realized musical sequence in theaters today as Better Man expands nationwide.

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