Louis Theroux on masculinity, marriage and more: ‘Would you like me to cry now?’

On the pavement outside the Netflix office, I stand in the rain, confused. Was that interview a little off? Louis Theroux seemed not to like my questions, which were typical interview questions, related to him and his big glossy Netflix debut, Inside the Manosphere. He seemed, I don’t know, prickly? A bit testy? I’m prone to rumination, so perhaps I am overthinking. Because Louis Theroux is a good guy, right? He skewers the bad guys. And yet here I am, baffled. The only thing to do is sit in a cafe and replay the tape.

Theroux is solicitous, lightly ironic in tone. “Louis,” he says. “How do you do?” I am fine. Looking forward to our chat, as you may imagine. Theroux, 55, might be north London dad in appearance – specs, grey T-shirt, black jeans, sneakers – but he’s the grandmaster of both the immersive documentary and interview form. The son of American writer Paul Theroux (a nepo baby before they existed), he has built a 30‑year career in television, much of it at the BBC, making a virtue of being a socially awkward verbivore, hyper‑curious, super-funny.

His 1990s stuff saw him embedded in American subcultures – Nazis, gun nuts, porn stars, apocalyptic cults – just to see what happened. It was TV of its era in that it was gonzo, shock-driven, perhaps a little ethically unsound in tone and the way that it poked fun at and portrayed its subjects. Later, came prisoners, opioid addicts and the Church of Scientology. Then there were the interviews. The most famous was with Jimmy Savile before the crimes of the children’s presenter became public, to whom he posed the tentative question: “People say that you are a paedophile?” (He replied, “Nobody knows whether I am or not.”)

More recently, Theroux joined the podcast universe with a show billed as “in-depth and freewheeling”. Then he became a viral sensation when Jiggle Jiggle, a rap he composed in 2000, resurfaced. Perhaps because there’s nothing Gen Z likes more than nostalgia plus a curiosity plus a dance routine, clips on TikTok and YouTube were streamed hundreds of millions of times. Shakira performed it, as did Snoop Dogg and Megan Thee Stallion. Now the kids knew who he was (to the despair of his own – “Why is my dad, the most cringe guy in the universe, everywhere on TikTok?”). A-listers such as Barry Keoghan, Paul Mescal, Florence Pugh and Justin Theroux, his cousin, appeared on the show.

While Theroux is accustomed to praise – including for his recent BBC documentary on the violence of ultra‑Zionist settlers in the West Bank – his podcast interview with musician Bobby Vylan in October was so controversial that British Airways paused sponsorship of his show.

He asked Vylan (real name Pascal Robinson-Foster) what he’d meant by his “Death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury last summer. Vylan said he wanted to end the IDF as an institution, but “end to the IDF” didn’t scan. Theroux said he didn’t agree with “death to” chants full-stop. But there were those, including Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate, who were angry that Theroux didn’t press Vylan on earlier calls for “death to every single IDF soldier”. This, Rich argued, made the interview sound like a “soft-soaping” in contrast to his usual needling style; many listeners also balked at Theroux’s use of the phrase “post Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism” when discussing Israel and the war in Gaza. Theroux stood by the interview. While it was “painful” to lose a sponsor, he said last month, his is a “unique place in the British broadcasting landscape. I’m willing to have difficult conversations and long may it continue … I’m very proud of how we handled the interview and how we did it”.

Now Theroux has a contract with global streamer Netflix, and this is where we are, in a windowless brown room on the fifth floor of their London headquarters. He pantomimes a juggle asking where I want him to sit and asks how long I want him. He can’t last much more than an hour before “the truth comes out. I have to watch myself”. The truth is good, I say, the truth is what we want. He shrinks from my recording devices as if they are two black scorpions. “That’s not off-putting at all to have two screens pointing at me. One of them showing literally what I’m saying as it comes out of my mouth.” He begins reading the transcription aloud in a sort of repetitive meta-loop that could go on forever if I don’t interrupt him. “Louis was stalling,” he tells the tape.

We’re here to discuss Inside the Manosphere’s content creators, promoters of extreme misogynistic ultra-masculinity.