How Robbie Williams’ ‘Better Man’ Pulls Off Its Wild Human-Monkey Sex Scenes

There are plenty of ways to spice up a biopic, a genre of film often derided for being exasperatingly formulaic. You can play with multiple timelines, focus on a singular, specific moment in someone’s life—or, if you’re the fantastic Better Man, you throw all the rules out the window and cast a chimpanzee to play the person you’re portraying. Everyone else is a human. And it’s a musical!

Yes, a chimpanzee is portraying British pop superstar Robbie Williams, who rose to fame as a member of the boyband Take That. Thrown into the limelight, Williams experiences the ecstatic highs and crushing lows of stardom—a whole lot of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. To answer the burning question that’s just entered your mind: Yes, that means a chimpanzee has sex with people in Better Man. But what’s remarkable about it is that it doesn’t come off as horrifying beastiality. Instead, Better Man grounds what could be deeply disturbing moments into quality sex scenes.

OK, so Better Man doesn’t feature a real primate. It’s a computer-generated one (courtesy of the masters at Wētā FX), performed through motion-capture technology by the brilliant (human) Jonno Davies. Director Michael Gracey knows something about creating a popular musical, having helmed The Greatest Showman, but Better Man is taking a great risk in making its protagonist a chimpanzee. Especially a chimpanzee that has sex with people.

The first sex scene in Better Man comes as a surprise. After years of longing to be successful, Robbie finally gets his first real taste of stardom with Take That. Narrating the film, Willams discusses how his awful band manager Nigel (Damon Herriman) controlled his life, including making Robbie and the band seem attainable to their target audience—girls. Among other things, he made the boys give talks about safe sex to teenage girls (while they were still teenagers themselves). They even had a helpful slogan: “Don’t be a fool, cover his tool,” complete with a little dance.

Garcey smash cuts straight to Robbie getting a h---job at a nightclub from a fan. The moment is immediately disarmed by Robbie’s voiceover: “Naturally, I took it all to heart,” he says of the safe sex advice. The humor continues: The girl performing the act on Robbie tells him, “I love the way you move, Gary,” referring to his bandmate Gary Barlow. She doesn’t have any idea that she’s giving a h---job to someone else, and Robbie has no idea who she is either. That’s a little weird, sure, but the idea here is that, while we see Robbie as a literal chimpanzee, nobody in the film does. That goes a long way in making the whole “j---ing off a chimpanzee” thing a lot less uncomfortable.

Continuing to distract audiences from the fact we’re seeing a woman give a h---job to a chimpanzee, Robbie (while being pleasured) sees Nigel from across the room, who looks at him furiously—any kind of sexual activity between Take That and their fans is strictly prohibited by their manager. Robbie panics and tells her to hurry up, and she stops. While looking his manager dead in the eye, he finishes the h---job himself. The camera closes in on Robbie’s face as he orgasms, ending the scene. It’s a funny moment rather than a horrifying one: an earnest exploration of Robbie’s ascent to fame and the complications that come with it, rather than gawking at a primate having sex with a female human.

That’s not the only sex scene in Better Man, but it’s the most significant in exploring how the film hones in on the human emotions behind the animal. By channeling all the awkwardness of fumbling around sexually and the calamity of fame, it completely takes the disturbing edge off the scene and allows us—like the person giving the h---job—to see Robbie as a human being. Much later in the film, when Robbie is in a deep personal crisis, we see him lying naked in bed with various women strewn over him. It’s not titillating nor disturbing; instead, it’s a vulnerable moment, as we see Robbie plunge deeper into his problems with drugs and alcohol, leading him from one bad decision to another.

The biggest reason the sex scenes (and various moments of debauchery) work so well in Better Man is the focus on Robbie as a person. The gimmick of him being a chimpanzee is never taken too far, and it only takes a few minutes before it feels weirdly natural.

That’s a huge credit to Jonno Davies, who does some of the year’s finest work here, easily surpassing the animal framework he’s in to deliver an emotional, nuanced, and powerful performance that makes you forget you’re watching a furry animal reach orgasm on screen. He’s the reason the film is so much better than it has any right to be. And that’s a pretty extraordinary feat.