It's always a challenge to play a well-known star on screen, but it's likely an extra challenge to play them as a chimpanzee.
That was the challenge facing Jonno Davies when it came to Better Man which saw him play Robbie Williams, only as a chimpanzee, meaning his entire performance was done in motion-capture.
But it was a unique task that Davies ended up relishing.
"Michael [Gracey], through the audition process, showed me some sketches. I saw the detail and then I knew it was Weta, who had such an incredible background, one of the best VFX companies in the world," he told Digital Spy.
Related: Robbie Williams compares new biopic to "therapy"
"Suddenly you go, 'OK I trust you guys, do your thing' and then I'll try and do my part as well. So it was really liberating. It was exciting as well. I think a lot of actors, we want a challenge and it certainly was.
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"You've got to get people to cry and cheer for someone that they already know in a whole different image. So yeah it's a really exciting thing to take on."
Better Man follows the rise and fall and rise of Robbie Williams from his breakthrough with Take That to his break-up with Take That, and then his subsequent success as a solo artist including record-breaking shows at Knebworth.
Throughout the movie, several of Williams' hits are reimagined including, most memorably, 'She's the One' which tells the story of his relationship with Nicole Appleton, the good and the bad, through an old-school Hollywood dance number.
"We shot most of the scenes of their relationship first because the dance sequence and the scene that proceeds it was shot in the last week," Raechelle Banno, who plays Nicole Appleton, recalled.
Related: Better Man is one of the best movies of the year
"We got to go on the rollercoaster first and then we just got to live in the playfulness of the romance of that scene. There's a lot of dark content, and then being able to dive into the playfulness of [the dance] was really fun."
Davies added: "I just thought it was such a brilliant way to tell a story, to chop the timeline up together. They have the meet-cute and then the audience gets to see their future play out before they do and I think it was a really way interesting way to tell the story."
Ahead of the release of Better Man in cinemas over Christmas, Williams also spoke to Digital Spy about how the biopic was "therapy".
Better Man is released in UK cinemas on December 26.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
