David Beckham joined director Fisher Stevens, producer Josh Battsek and editor Michael Harte at an Emmys For Your Consideration event for their Beckham documentary Sunday night, as the soccer star revealed some behind-the-scenes details of his viral “be honest” moment.
Beckham quickly became a meme — and the subject of a Super Bowl commercial — when, in the documentary, he interjected in the middle of Victoria Beckham‘s interview as she talked about having a modest upbringing.
“It was Victoria’s first day filming, and she was sat there in the lounge, looking great. She had the dogs running in and out and Fisher thought that I’d left the house, but I was in the kitchen making a coffee before I went to the office,” Beckham recalled. “I put the set of headphones on, and all of a sudden I heard my wife go, ‘Well, we’re down to earth.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ As soon as I heard her say, ‘We’re working class,’ I stuck my head in and I was like, ‘Be honest,'” noting that at the time, Stevens was “very angry with me over that.”
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Stevens explained that they scheduled “the interview with Victoria because David was supposedly out and she could be free to say what she wants, and then he showed up and I was quite upset. I was like, ‘Get him out of here,’ but it actually turned out to be brilliant,” the filmmaker admitted. “It worked out. Thank God the cameraman caught David, and then to Michael, I did say, ‘We have gold, I think.'”
During the conversation, held at Netflix‘s Tudum Theater in Hollywood, Beckham reflected on why it was the right time for the four-episode docuseries, which follows his long soccer career and life in the public eye.
“In all honesty, when I retired 10 years ago, some of my friends, family, they started to ask me about a documentary. And I just said to them that I’m not ready to look back yet,” he explained, and when asked again several years later, decided to time it to the 10-year anniversary of his retirement. “It took me a long time to come to terms with doing it, in all honesty. It wasn’t something that I thought straight away that I wanted to do. And even after a few years, I still questioned, did I want to do it?”
Stevens chimed in, “I think he questioned it while we were doing it,” which the star confirmed.
When asked if there was anything he wouldn’t let the cameras film, Beckham replied, “I always said to Fisher that I’m only going to do this once and I’m going to do it properly. Nothing’s off the table and anything you want to ask me, we’re going to talk about it and we’ll get there in the end.” He also admitted he “didn’t enjoy the process” and would often try to get out of his long filming sessions with Stevens, remembering, “Every time that we sat down for those five hours, I just needed to go away for another five hours to be on my own. Because it was just so hard, it was so difficult and so uncomfortable to talk about — not just the uncomfortable parts.”
He acknowledged that the documentary served as a form of therapy for him, and made him feel better about some of the more emotional moments in his career, including leaving Manchester United and being red carded during the 1998 World Cup. That therapy also extended beyond him, to his friends and family.
“The reason I wanted to do a documentary is because I wanted something for my family to have all in one place, to celebrate what we’d all been through together. Because my parents, my grandparents, my sisters, my friends, [they’ve] all have been through that and I hadn’t realized how it had affected them all until I saw them talking about it on the documentary,” Beckham added. “So that for me made me feel better in a weird way, that they could actually talk about it as well.”
He also revealed that he watched the docuseries for the first time alongside Victoria, on an iPad in bed, “and we laughed, we cried.” The star also noted that at the start of the project, Victoria asked him to make the documentary about more than just soccer, and that they were inspired by Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance. “I remember [sitting] there and saying to Victoria, ‘I’m watching this documentary about basketball tonight, Michael Jordan, and it’s called The Last Dance‘ and she was like, ‘Eh,'” he recalled. “But she watched it and she was like, ‘Oh my God, when’s the next one? When’s next?’ And she said, ‘That’s what we need.'”
At the end of the conversation, Beckham expressed his appreciation to the audience for the documentary’s success, saying, “It’s something that was so personal to me and to my family and the fact that people have loved it as much as everyone’s loved it, it makes us all feel very proud and emotional that we’ve made something that makes people happy, dance, cook, all of those things.”
