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Robbie Williams is looking to head back to school and hit the books, he has revealed.
Williams, who joined Take That at the age of 16 while preparing for the GCSEs, has shared in a new chat with The Sun that he’s been weighing his options in re-sitting for his exams, having left school without any qualifications.
He told the publication: “I’ve been wanting to set up a university but, actually, I wouldn’t be able to attend if and when I do, because I didn’t get any GCSEs. I got nothing higher than a grade D, and everything else I failed or I didn’t turn up for. I really want to go back and get them.”
He continued, explaining that he hadn’t been diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD at the time: “All my life I’ve felt really stupid because we didn’t know about dyslexia in the seventies and eighties in Stoke-on-Trent. I’ve got dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, but we didn’t have those then, so I left school thinking I was a dumb-dumb and it’s taken ages to get over that. And now I just wanna go and prove a few people wrong — I’m not thick. Now that I’ve said that, I’m shitting myself… maybe I am!”
Besides wanting to re-sit his GCSEs, Robbie Williams is also entertaining the though of a TV show about his journey back to school: “I can’t remember my English teacher’s name, but I was thinking there might be an interesting TV show in it, where I have to go back to school… but obviously in an age- appropriate way.”
Williams revealed his numerical dyslexia diagnosis in 2020, causing him to be unable to do simple math equations and has had a larger effect on his daily life: “I always get in trouble because I don’t know my kids’ birth dates and I don’t know our anniversary and I don’t know my wife’s birthday. I can’t even remember our house in Los Angeles. It has four digits for the start of the address and I can’t ever remember what those digits are.”
Despite his dyslexia, ADHD and poor education, Williams has made a success of himself, turning his time with Take That into a formidable solo career that has spanned decades. He’s now the subject of the biopic Better Man, where he’s portrayed as a CGI monkey.
Speaking to NME about the film, Williams reflected on seeing his life story depicted on film: “Tears. And triggering. And grief. And healing. And ego. And: ‘Look at what’s happened to me!’. It just depends on which version of me turns up for the screening on that particular day – and how much sleep I’ve had.
“At the minute, I just wanna take all of this in. I wanna drink every moment that I can, because I’m now in a place where I can derive joy from life. I couldn’t derive any joy from life for such a long time. And I feel as though I’m getting lucky again and I’m getting another bite of the apple.”
In a three-star review of Better Man, Jordan Bassett wrote for NME: “Better Man begins like a John Lewis ad and swerves into an R-rated hodgepodge that somehow does too much while also barely skimming the surface of Robbie Williams’ career. This is ‘Rudebox’ on film: some of it good, some of it very bad, all of it a bit of a mess. Still, the monkey musical is a big swing that no-one else would have taken. You can’t fault the chutzpah or the ambition. If it makes back its reported budget, we’ll eat $110m worth of bananas.”
