The viral moment of David Beckham telling Victoria to “be honest,” initially made the Beckham director Fisher Stevens mad, according to The Hollywood Reporter during an Emmys For Your Consideration event.
Just to refresh your memory, in an episode of the Netflix docuseries, Victoria Beckham was being interviewed about her childhood. When she described her family as working class, David’s head just popped out behind a door to correct her, “Be honest. Be honest.” He proceeded to ask her what kind of car her father drove her to school with. After a few moments of hedging, Posh Spice finally said, “My father drove a Rolls Royce.”
To which England football team’s former captain replied, “Thank you.”
Beckham vs Beckham: Be honest
The couple also based their Super Bowl commercial on the scene.
“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 said.
“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 y head in and I was like, ‘Be honest,’” he continued.
The Inter Miami co-owner also noted that Stevens was “very angry with me over that.”
The director explained that they had scheduled the interview with Victoria with the knowledge that Beckham was supposed to be 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 that in the end, “It worked out. Thank God the cameraman caught David, and then to Michael, I did say, ‘We have gold, I think.’”
During the event held at Netflix’s Tudum Theater in Hollywood, Beckham explained why it was the right time for him to release the four-episode docuseries on his career and subsequent public life.
Docuseries as therapy
“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. 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?” he said.
As to whether there were parts of his life that he didn’t want to be part of the documentary, Beckham stated, “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.”
However, he admitted that there were parts of the process that he didn’t enjoy. The former football star would usually go off on his own after the long filming sessions.
And by sessions, akin to therapy which Beckham readily admitted. He said that making the documentary was a form of therapy for him, to make him feel better about the more emotional moments he’s experienced in his career. Two of the more notable ones would be his leaving Manchester United and the red card seen around the world during the 1998 World Cup.
He has another reason for wanting to do the documentary: something for his family “to have all in one place, to celebrate what we’d all been through together.” Beckham said that he didn’t realize how much of his life had affected his parents, grandparents, sisters and friends until he saw them talk about it on the documentary.
But it’s not all heavy stuff. There’s always that viral moment he and wife Victoria can look back on. While it could have been a tense moment between a long-married couple and their differences growing up — Beckham’s family were definitely the working class and not Victoria’s — it turned out to be a funny moment and a lucrative one. The couple’s first Super Bowl ad fee most likely paid out between $500,000 to $2 million.
Now, that’s definitely not a working class kind of money. Be honest.
