Here is the text without any HTML tags or other formatting:
It’s 2001 and nine-year-old Jonno Davies is standing in the crowd as Robbie Williams entertains 65,000 people at the Milton Keynes Bowl. He was just this symbol of cool, and that stuck with me for a long time… He was like the rock star of the day for me.
Now 32, Davies is appearing in cinemas around the world in Better Man, a musical biopic in which he plays his childhood hero. But he is far from recognisable, partly because of his hard work studying and recreating William’s voice and mannerisms, but mostly because he’s represented on screen as a computer-generated chimpanzee.
Davies says he feels the audience aren’t watching it going: Do I believe that’s him? Does that look enough like Robbie? Does that sound like Robbie? Because there’s a monkey, we’ve already gone beyond that idea of comparison. It meant I didn’t have to be vain. I wasn’t looking at the monitor going ‘Oh god, the double chin’… It was just about being truthful to the storyline.
That said the actor says his face can be seen for a “tiny split second” at the very end of the film: “Kudos to anyone that actually sees that.”
In 2022, Davies is rehearsing for a scene on stage at the Royal Albert Hall when Williams, who he has not met yet, is in the audience. “I was about to sing and in he steps, plonks himself in the middle of the front row,” the actor says. “Wow that’s Robbie Williams, that’s who I’m playing, don’t mess it up. I probably did because voice was going and knees were buckling.”
He didn’t mess it up. Not according to Williams himself who describes the performer as a “fantastic human being”.
Davies, who grew up in Milton Keynes, attended Bedford School between 2001 and 2010. While attending he took part in musical productions of Bugsy Malone, Fiddler on the Roof and History Boys.
Now the actor’s name is on one of the seats at the school’s theatre and he likes to return to visit the pupils. “Anything I feel that I can learn I’d love to pass on to them,” he says. “Maybe we can do like a motion capture day somehow. Do some animal studies, as it were.”
Source link
