Robbie Williams claims a hit man was once hired to kill him when he was "Michael Jackson-like famous"

17 January 2022, 16:54 | Updated: 19 January 2022, 17:13

Robbie Williams has said that a hitman was hired to get him. Picture: Alamy

By Tom Eames

Robbie Williams has revealed that he was apparently the target of a hitman at the height of his career.

Robbie, who began his career with Take That back in the early 1990s, has said that he had “a contract” put on him to “kill” him.

He explained to The Mirror: “I’ve never, ever said this, but I had a contract put on me to kill me. I’ve never said that publicly before. It went away. I have friends. That stuff is the unseen stuff that happens when you become famous.

“At one point in my life I was ridiculously famous, Michael Jackson-style famous.

“I became famous when I was 17, doing a boy band when I was 16, the boy band took off,” Robbie said.

“When I was 21, I left, and then I had a solo career, sold 80 million albums, held the record for the most tickets sold in a day for a tour and blah, blah, blah…”

He also spoke about the anxiety and depression he has experienced as a result of “extreme success”.

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“Extreme fame and extreme success meets with anxiety and depression and mental illness,” he said. “There’s a few levels of fame and what it does to you. The first one is f**k.

“There’s a couple more I can’t remember but the fourth one is acceptance. You sort of rally against your privacy being taken away from you and you rally against it by trying to be normal, trying to be normal but also I’m gonna be small so people don’t beat you up.

"Like, ‘I’m a dickhead, don’t hurt me,’” he said. “I want to go to all the normal places I can’t go because people want to kill me. It takes a while to get to acceptance.”

Meanwhile, Robbie is set to the focus of a new musical biopic - in which he will feature as a CGI monkey - called Better Man.