Robbie Williams has revealed a hitman was hired to kill him at the height of his fame.
In a new interview with The Mirror, the Brit Award winner opened up about the downsides of being famous, which included a serious threat to his life in the earlier years of his career.
He said: “I’ve never, ever said this, but I had a contract put on me to kill me. I’ve never said that publicly before.”
The Angels singer went on to add that the threat eventually “went away” after some intervention, stating: “I have friends. That stuff is the unseen stuff that happens when you become famous.”
He continued: “At one point in my life I was ridiculously famous, Michael Jackson-style famous.
“I became famous when I was 17, doing a boyband when I was 16… 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…
“Extreme fame and extreme success meets with anxiety and depression and mental illness.”
Robbie now spends most of his time in LA, telling the podcast he made the decision to move across the pond when he decided that rather than continuing his attempts at cracking America, he’d prefer to embrace the anonymity that being in the States provided.
“I want to go to the all the normal places I can’t go because people want to kill me. It takes a while to get to acceptance,” he recently told the podcast This Past Weekend.
“I have anxiety and don’t like meeting strangers, but strangers want to meet me, and I feel really uncomfortable about it. Thinking about it actually gives me anxiety. It’s a trigger.”
Robbie continued: “I came to America to promote an album. And I’m in Milwaukee and doing a radio station to eight people at seven o’clock in the morning and I already have millions in the bank and a huge following and I’m depressed and I’m anxious…
“So I’m going around America doing all this stuff and I’m going, ’Hang on, all of this fame is making me anxious and depressed… Then I’m like, ‘Hang on, what am I doing here?’.
“This realisation is happening as I’m travelling through America trying to break America. ‘Why am I trying to break this? Why don’t I go and live there and live in anonymity and then have a nice life?’.”
“The grown up driving the car made a decision to not promote in America, not do anything,” he added.“So I moved there and turned everything down that I was offered in the States.
“Basically, what happens is I live in anonymity here and really enjoy that, then I try to move back to my home country and remember that I have no anonymity there and that makes me feel anxious and depressed and then I move back to the States.”
Robbie began dating the model Ayda Field in 2006, with the pair tying the knot four years later.
Together, they have four children, eight-year-old Teddy, five-year-old Charlie, three-year-old Coco and their youngest son Beau, who will celebrate his second birthday next month.
Since leaving Take That, Robbie has released 12 studio albums, the most recent of which – the festive album The Christmas Present – came out in 2019.
