Secrets of the Beckham Marriage, According to Victoria

Although David Beckham’s trajectory to fame is the subject of his Netflix 2023 documentary Beckham, it was his wife, Victoria Beckham, who became the film’s breakout star. She tells her side of the story with the new three-part documentary, Victoria Beckham, now streaming on Netflix. Directed by Nadia Hallgren (who also directed the Emmy-nominated Michelle Obama documentary, Becoming), the new series follows Beckham’s journey from Spice Girl to fashion mogul as she prepares to debut her spring 2025 collection at Paris Fashion Week. Victoria Beckham also explores what motivated its titular figure to become a performer, how she stripped the “WAG” (a.k.a., wives and girlfriends of athletes) label imposed by the tabloid media, and what she did to earn respect in the cutthroat fashion industry.

The documentary delves into the relationship between Victoria and David, who have been married since 1999 and share four kids: Brooklyn, 26, Romeo, 23, Cruz, 20, and Harper, 14.

In Victoria Beckham, David and Victoria often speak of each other during interviews, interrupting or teasing the other. David jokes, “When I met Victoria, I couldn’t find one thing about her that I didn’t like. I mean, I could find a few now.” The crackling chemistry on display in David’s documentary (who else remembers that dance to “Islands in the Stream”?) remains. When David offers Victoria a snack, she replies, “I haven’t touched chocolate since the ’90s—I’m not gonna start now.” And his attempts to tell a bad joke in the first episode are met with the following quip: “He thinks that’s going to be his moment in the documentary. It’s not about him, it’s about me.”

In 1997, Victoria, who was already making headlines as Posh Spice, first saw a strapping young Beckham in a football match. “When I met David,” she says in the documentary, “I’d never felt that connection with anybody before.” In David’s documentary, he recalls driving four hours just to spend 20 minutes with her, and the fiery attraction doesn’t appear to have cooled. While talking about David’s home farming projects, Victoria cracks, “Oh, his chicken house is impressive. You should see his cock; it’s magnificent.”

In both documentaries, Victoria and David speak about their secretive early courtship. “Nobody knew we were dating,” David says in the new series. “At that time, the Spice Girls were so big, and I was just a footballer in Manchester. But I was so excited, I wanted everyone to know I was dating Posh Spice.” And while his parents and coach may have preferred that David had “met a local girl who stayed in Manchester, who lived in Manchester, who never wanted to leave Manchester, and was just my wife. But I didn’t want that,” David says. “I never wanted that.”

Although it had “never occurred” to Victoria to settle down until she met David, the press often minimized the pop star as merely a footballer’s wife. “It’s hard when you’re married to an athlete because the world idolizes them,” Victoria’s longtime friend Eva Longoria, who was married to NBA player Tony Parker from 2007 to 2010, says in the doc.

“My Victoria, the one that I knew, sat at home in a tracksuit smiling, laughing, having a glass of wine,” David says in Victoria’s documentary. “But that started to go because of the criticism she was getting.”

In the docuseries, Victoria blames David for her signature stoic look on the red carpet. As she explains, because David always stands on her left, she’s usually photographed from her right side. “I didn’t realize that when I smile—which I do—I smile from the left, because if I smile from the right I look unwell,” Victoria says. “So consequently, I’m smiling on the inside, but no one ever sees it, so that’s why I look so moody.”

For years, Victoria went to painstaking lengths to manage her image. “I was controlling [the narrative] in an incredibly unhealthy way. When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying,” she says in the documentary. “And I was never very honest about it with my parents. I never talked about it publicly. It really affects you when you’re being told constantly you’re not good enough. And I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.” She now concedes there was an “element of attention seeking” to her WAG-forward image. “I was trying to find myself, I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time maybe,” Victoria says.

When the Beckhams moved to America in 2007 for David’s spot on the LA Galaxy soccer team, “the [tabloid] focus was less on me and it gave her confidence—a lot more than she’d had for a long time,” he recalls of his wife.

It was on the 2008 Spice Girls reunion tour that Victoria realized the stage was no longer where she belonged. She turned her gaze to the world of high fashion, meeting Vogue’s Anna Wintour, designers Tom Ford, Donatella Versace, and Victoria’s eventual mentor, French designer Roland Mouret (all of whom appear in the documentary). At the time, she was viewed as an outsider. “She’s a pop star married to a footballer, who does she think she is?” Victoria imagines her critics saying. Mouret says, “To make the dream a reality, we had to kill the WAG.”

To do so, Victoria says she transformed into “a simpler, more elegant version of myself” and debuted her first collection—10 dresses shown in a Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite—sans David, to eliminate any distraction. After earning rave reviews, Victoria gained a foothold in the fashion industry. But despite the professional respect, financial strain crept in. David was “investing a lot” in her business, and “we were tens of millions of pounds in the red,” Victoria explains in the documentary.

“I was panicked by it. Because I never saw anything coming back,” David says of his investment in the business. “We always agreed that we would support each other no matter what, but it worried me. This isn’t sustainable.”

Though her business recovered, the scars of that experience remained. But in the new series, David makes it clear to Victoria that he’ll support her no matter what she does. “You are so driven, so passionate, dedicated,” he tells her in the documentary, growing teary-eyed. “It makes me quite emotional because you are always trying to prove yourself to people. But who are you trying to prove it to?”

“Maybe to you,” Victoria replies, wiping away a tear. “Of course, I feel bad. About all those times I’ve had to ask you to bail me out. When I saw your face and the kids’ faces [during her Paris fashion show], I saw for the first time how proud of me you were.”

“You could make a cheese sandwich, and we’d be proud of you,” David replies.

“Actually, I couldn’t,” she laughs, to which he responds, “I know.”