Following another successful series of BBC Two’s Louis Theroux Interviews, we explore what has cemented Theroux as one of today’s most iconic interviewers.
Awkward is the charm
“I’ve got a high tolerance for awkwardness, but yours is off the charts.”
“Explain,” Chelsea Manning replies to Louis Theroux, sitting inches away from her, his sensible white trainers almost touching her chunky lace-up boots.
“Well,” he says: “You seem to be more comfortable sitting in silence. You’re even better at it than I am.”
Disarmed by his own weapon of choice (silence), Theroux appears (even more) awkward than usual.
In 2013, Manning, the American activist and whistleblower, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison. Manning tells Theroux she has sat in silence for far longer than he could ever imagine, owing to the endless hours spent in solitary confinement. However much practice Louis has had, she says, would not rival her ability to sit in total quiet.
It sets a precedent for the rest of the episode, which, at times, is quite hard to watch as Manning relays trauma from her childhood, time in the military and Iraq, and during and after her incarceration. It is trauma that feels almost visceral to viewers. After Theroux asks Manning (whose prison sentence was eventually commuted by Obama in 2017) if she wants to take a break. Off-camera, crying, you hear her say to her manager: “He just asks questions nobody has bothered to ask.”
A brief biography
The son of American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux and English mother Anne Castle, Louis Theroux, now 53, moved to the UK from Singapore when he was one and holds American and British citizenship. Theroux has several famous family members — his older brother Marcel is a writer and presenter, and his cousin Justin Theroux is an actor and screenwriter.
Before gaining a first-class History degree from Magdalen College Oxford, Louis Theroux attended Westminster School alongside the likes of Nick Clegg, with whom he later travelled to America.
The beginning of Theroux’s foray into the weird and wonderful began following a stint as a print journalist in the US. At 23 years old, he appeared as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s TV Nation — a satirical US news magazine show. In this role, Theroux dipped into the unusual and the extreme, creating segments on the show on everything from the Klu Klux Klan to a couple with a crime scene clean-up business and the so-called Cops for Christ.
Looking at these earlier pieces, much of Theroux’s style has remained the same — faux naive enough to disarm his subjects but authentic, pragmatic, and curious enough to keep on their right side. Following his work on TV Nation, Theroux signed a deal with the BBC back in the UK to develop a new, longer-form version of the segments, which became Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. Here, in 50-minute instalments, Theroux spends time in various unusual settings and with some of society’s most extreme believers. Theroux dips his toe into everything from UFOs and wrestling to the swinging community and born-again Christian evangelicalism — in some instances, more than his toe.
Since then, Theroux has released various specials and feature-length films, plus two seasons of When Louis Met…, where he followed a different British celebrity in each episode while they went about their day-to-day life and work. Perhaps most notably, he spent time with paedophile Jimmy Savile — the subject of which he revisited in a later documentary after Savile’s death, delving into his past interactions with the predatory public figure.
A life of Louis
During secondary school, we often watched Louis Theroux documentaries. Naturally, topics on the syllabus in Religious Studies and Philosophy — religious subcultures, medical ethics, morality — led to a Louis viewing at least a couple of times a year.
At university, I studied a module about crime and punishment in America and found Louis Theroux’s various American escapades on the reading list. So, in many ways, he has always been there.
Theroux has garnered cultural significance across generations — his subjects span people from all walks of life, from prolific criminals to Gen Z pop and rock stars. In the recent series of Louis Theroux Interviews, Dame Joan Collins DBE provides a personal and painful insight into 1950s Hollywood, while musician Raye reflects on the music industry’s power dynamics in recent years. Although there are 64 years between the women, many of their experiences are frighteningly similar. Anybody with a TikTok account who didn’t know who Louis Theroux was before does now, thanks to his viral ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ rap, which resurfaced on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date. As Theroux informed Raye on her interview episode, his Spotify artist profile (where you will find three remixes of ‘Jiggle Jiggle’) attracted 792K monthly listeners. Dimoldenberg told Vogue that Theroux is one of her heroes, and a direct inspiration for much of her “awkward interview style”.
What sets Theroux apart from his contemporaries?
There are other proficient documentarians out there who are also popular across generations. I’ve followed popular broadcasters and documentary makers like Reggie Yates and Stacey Dooley since their CBBC days. Both are excellent at what they do and explore equally important and compelling issues. In Yates’s 2016 series The Insider: Reggie Yates, for example, we see him live and work deep within institutions, including prisons (as an inmate and a guard), the Mexican military fighting the drug war, and a refugee camp.
Dooley’s documentaries have involved a similarly stark personal element as she’s immersed herself into different communities, journeys, and ways of life — from following children on migrant trails across Europe to her recent film Inside the Undertakers, where she confronts her own fear of death.
All three filmmakers are equally adept communicators. So what sets Theroux apart? Rather than being necessarily superior to his documentarian counterparts, Theroux, I think, is different; perhaps it’s fair to say unique.
However enthralling the person or topic Theroux is exploring, we also witness what I would call ‘a spectacle of human interaction’. An intimate, instinctive back and forth of interactions and emotions facilitated by the trademark style Theroux has curated over time. An awkward yet refined and diplomatic approach to interviewing.
You don’t have to know or even like an interviewee to know it will still be worth watching, which I think says a lot.
What’s the magic ingredient?
If Theroux, the recipient of three BAFTAs and an RTS Award, was a cake recipe, it would be along the lines of the following:
- 50g of awkwardness
- 50g of compassion
- 50g of abruptness
- 75g of pragmatism
- 75g of ambivalence
- 100g of empathy
- A dash of naivety
- A pinch of perplexedness
- Cook with a good 20 seconds of awkward silence
For the icing:
- Mix 50g of irony with some sensible shoes, some Specsaver glasses frames, a sprinkling of fearlessness, and another awkward pause for good luck.
How do you make awkwardness endearing?
Like Louis Theroux, I am categorically an awkward person. Unlike Louis Theroux, my awkwardness is not endearing. I tend to want to fill awkward silences rather than let them marinate. My Nana always used to call me a “gabbler,” owing to my tendency to chatter away without a pause. I suppose I have just never been overly comfortable with silence. While I do not squirm as much as I used to, I am still learning to let the silence sit in my professional life as an early career journalist.
I think part of why Theroux remains endearing while awkwardly silent is thanks to the industry reputation he has built up over time. People want to be interviewed by him. To sit down with Theroux and contemplate his questions is to have ‘made it’ in one way or another.
As we’ve seen with stars including Stormzy, Yungblud, and Raye, it feels “surreal” to be followed around and asked questions by Theroux, perhaps because he’s a bit of a pop culture icon — or because they feel they will further discover or understand something about themselves. In a way, Louis Theroux is the stranger you have those deep, often existential chats with at a friend of a friend’s house party.
Usually, Theroux doesn’t really do small talk. Or, when he does, it is always intentional in some way, whether that is to make his interviewees feel more at ease or, in the case of his TV Nation and Weird Weekend segments, for a more comical effect.
For the most part, Theroux strikes the balance between expectation and compassion when putting a big statement or question on the table.
Ambivalence
In a 2005 interview with The Independent, Theroux discusses something Ann Widdecombe once told him: that everyone should have some belief they should be willing to be burnt at the stake for. Over time, though, Theroux decided he wasn’t so sure. Rather, he told The Independent: “There is no shame in being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.”
It is this ambivalence, I think, that makes Theroux so widely appreciated as an interviewer. His recognition that uncertainty is an acceptable quality means his interviewees, and viewers, are more likely to trust him and reflect on what is said. We have space to form our own opinions.
In 2011, Theroux told The Guardian: “I’m not that comfortable doing polemic or being strident. It’s not me.”
In a world filled with Piers Morgans and Lawrence Foxes, this is what cuts through the noise. You can watch seasons one and two of Louis Theroux Interviews on BBC iPlayer.
Words by Hannah Bradfield
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