‘But who is Robbie Williams?’: What’s up with the international star being a nobody in the United States?

Robbie Williams (Stoke-on-Trent, England, 50 years old) is a star who nearly nobody knows about in the United States. Such is the short and sweet biography of the singer, who first rose to fame in the boy band Take That and went on to become one of history’s most successful solo artists, with nearly 60 million albums sold all over the world — except in the United States. The release of Better Man, a bizarre biopic in which he is played by a monkey, was his opportunity to put an end to this lopsided panorama. But for the moment, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Better Man has opened to excellent critical reception, with reviewers finding it both original and fresh following the avalanche in recent years of hagiographies of nearly every famous musician ever in the wake of the massive success of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Audiences have been barraged by films about the lives of Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Pharrell Williams (rendered in Legos!) and Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Madonna’s was canceled, but Michael Jackson’s is in the works — we’ll have to see how that one plays out.

The trailer for Better Man opens with the phrase, “I’m Robbie Williams. I’m one of the biggest pop stars in the world.” The film’s potential U.S. audience, however, has taken to social media with questions like, “Robbie who?” Even in comments on the trailer itself, which has racked up eight million views, there’s no lack of such queries. For example: “The biggest pop stars in the world? Haha.” Responses vary from “Of course he is!” to “I had to look him up because I don’t know anything about him.” The crazy thing is, both sentiments are valid..

Many British artists and groups have triumphed in the United States. The 1960s and the 1980s were considered the first and second waves of the British invasion of the U.S. charts, from the Beatles to Duran Duran, the Rolling Stones to Phil Collins, Elton John to George Michael. While it’s less and less accurate to say that the country’s sales dominate the world (Latin and Asian superstars have started to create their own, lucrative markets and superstardom is no longer limited to pop and rock icons from New York and L.A.), the United States is still the biggest music market and the one on which every artist eager to make it big has their eye. But for every performer who has managed to cross the pond and transfer their success in Great Britain to a country as big, difficult and complex to break as the United States, there are many more who have remained suspended in an odd position: pop stars in Europe, Asia and Oceania, but nearly unknown on the U.S. market. Among them, Robbie Williams is patron saint.

Following the release of Better Man and the film’s promotion and presence on red carpets like the Golden Globes (where the movie’s main theme, Forbidden Road, was nominated for Best Original Song), several U.S. publications have penned explainers for their readers as to who, exactly, Robbie Williams is. They are nearly always written by British journalists. “I, a lonely Brit in L.A., have a sharp desire to teach this country about the Robster,” states an article in Vulture. “Here’s An Explainer On Robbie Williams For The Americans Baffled By ‘Better Man,’” runs a title on Buzzfeed. All share the same biographical facts already familiar to those who grew up listening to European radio: with nearly 60 million albums sold, Williams is one of the most successful solo artists of all time. Seven of his songs and 14 of his albums have hit the top of the United Kingdom charts, and he’s a true pop idol in his home country. In 2002, he signed the most lucrative contract in British music history at nearly $131 million, and his private life — with all its alcohol, drugs and various relationships with women both anonymous and famous — has been the subject of every tabloid and society magazine in the country and beyond.

There was an attempt to raise Williams’ profile in the United States in 1999 with the album The Ego Has Landed, which contained a selection of songs from his first two albums, including the mega-hit Angels, which has become the most-played song at British funerals. But for various reasons, it didn’t stick. Williams has spoken of this moment several times, but perhaps the definitive, institutional statement can be found on his own official website: “Outside America — a country and a market destined never to quite appreciate his quirkily English combination of hilarious and heartfelt, sentimental and sardonic, silly and sublime — Robbie was now perhaps the biggest pop star in the world.” In the Netflix documentary Robbie Williams, which debuted in 2024, an archival image shows him in a van in New York in 1999, while audio plays in which he explains that the only reason he was looking to make it there was that, “America kind of scares me because it’s so fucking big. I’d really love to break it here and sell a lot of records and piss a lot of people off back home. That’s what I want to do.” In the documentary, he makes it clear that the United States wasn’t a fan of his self-lacerating humor, that they didn’t understand why he loved flashing his butt, smoking so many cigarettes and swearing so relentlessly. It was all a bit much for U.S. tastes, which at the time were focused on classic, white teen pop that seemed more inspired by Swiss precision than British laxness.

Williams kept it moving, focusing on his superstardom in the rest of the world. He went through highs and lows, reunited with Take That, split again with Take That. He settled down with actress Ayda Field, had four kids, turned 50 and one day, to the confusion of many, decided that it would be a good idea to invest $110 million in producing a film about the life of a singer in which he is played by a monkey. On an artistic level, it appears to have been a good idea: the film has its fair share of critic-enthusiasts. “The biggest cinematic surprise of the year,” says Empire. “A fun, bombastic, brilliantly choreographed and totally enthralling film,” according to Time Out. “Fabulously entertaining and touching,” comments The New York Times. But when the film failed at the end of December in box offices in the United Kingdom, the country in which Williams is a shooting star, its fate seemed sealed. In the United States it has earned little more than $1 million. The movie is considered the first flop of 2025, even if in time, it could become a cult classic.

In any case, Williams has always dealt well with failure, owning it with his particular, defeated sense of humor. His solo career started with a flop (his first album, Life thru a Lens, took a long time to be a hit), followed by the fiasco in the United States during his imperial era. In 2006, he was met with another failure in the form of his strangest and riskiest album, Rudebox. Two years later, it was reported that one million unsold copies of the Rudebox CD had been sent to China, where they were used as recycled material to reinforce sidewalks. Williams’ failures hint at some kind of amusingly jovial anecdote, if not cruel fable, regarding fame. And all have contributed to the personality of a singer who has always felt the breath of others’ disapproval on the back of his neck. Who is Robbie Williams?, they keep asking in the United States. Well, he’s the one who failed with a movie about himself in which he was played by a monkey, of course. Perhaps this, better than any song, sums up Williams’ personality and career. (Besides the fact that he is a multi-millionaire author, producer and singer. But that seems less literary, somehow.)

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