I
t’s 1987 and Louis Theroux, Nick
Clegg and a roadrunner are racing
through the American South (this
isn’t the start of a joke). The two
men, who met at Westminster
School, have embarked on a lads’
road trip from Cape Cod to Los Angeles
with Theroux’s brother, Marcel.
Brought up on Looney Tunes, the boys
have been dying to see a real-life road-
runner. Somewhere northwest of New
Orleans, they finally spot one.
“We slowed down,” Theroux recalls.
“ ‘It’s there! We’ve seen a roadrunner!’ ”
And then? “It darted in front of the car
and then disappeared, just a tumble of
feathers. It was a nostalgic piece of recog-
nition, then a tragic biological event.”
This is the perfect Theroux story:
bizarre, adventurous, privileged, set in
deep America and leavened with a
heavy dash of the macabre. Indeed his
remarkable career — multiple Baftas,
renowned as one of the great modern
documentarians — has been fuelled
from day one by this fusion of American
eccentricity and Theroux’s charisma.
For almost 30 years, from supermax
jails to survivalist compounds, wherever
American myth and madness becomes
manifest, he has turned up, deploying
his unique brand of curated naivety.
He describes the US as like a “cultural
candy store: exciting and tantalising and
maybe not that good for you. I kind of
love this place and I also hate it.”
Yet Theroux has changed over the
years. The man who joins me for tea in
London is 51, no longer a wide-eyed
Bambi gawping at the depravity of the
new world. He has three children with
his wife, Nancy Strang, a television pro-
ducer, and our conversation is inter-
rupted by a pressing demand to author-
ise an orthodontist appointment.
“Over the last 25 years there’s been
this gradual change where I’ve taken
on a more conventional journalistic
role,” he reflects. “I couldn’t really be
faux-naive any more. I’m here in plain
sight. I’m not like Sacha Baron Cohen
who is coming up with new disguises
so he’s got a new angle of attack and
[can] ask ludicrous questions.”
America has changed too. In the
1990s, when he made his bones as a
chronicler of the indigenous American
berserk, Clinton was in the White House,
US power was paramount and to a cas-
ual observer the country seemed confi-
dent, almost normal. “It was all going on
under the surface, if you knew where to
look,” he says. “Now it’s in the open air.”
He thinks the radicalising power of the
internet has brought these forces to the
fore. “The US on the whole, it’s weirder
than it was. Trump is evidence of that.”
And so Theroux, who has been
“professionally wedded” to weirdnesshis entire career, has returned to his
favourite canvas with three new Forbid-
den America documentaries on three
familiar topics: rap, porn and the far
right. The focus is how these subcul-
tures have been upended by the inter-
net. Young rap artists beef on YouTube;
female porn stars are launching a
#MeToo insurgency on Instagram; andINTERVIEW
white supremacists are reaching huge
audiences through memes and trolling.
Despite the angle, this series feels a
bit like squeezing an old lemon for new
juice. The strike against these exposés,
and indeed much British coverage of the
US, is that they generate more heat than
light, confirming our laziest assump-
tions without getting to the heart of the
matter. Does Theroux worry about por-
traying the US as nothing more than a
gun-toting, gay-hating, prison-loving cir-
cus? “I can’t control how the pro-
grammes are received. I’m not position-
ing the programmes as depictions of
America in its entirety. I’m sure for
some it’s a new iteration of a slightly
freak show-like programming tradition,
but I think most people get it.”
Another dilemma is platforming. In
his new series Theroux spends time
with two young far-right internet per-
sonalities, Nick Fuentes and Baked
Alaska. They have been banned from
most social media and shunned by themainstream conservative movement, so
why not leave them in the shadows?
This is a “big concern” of Theroux’s.
He acknowledges that some may view
him as a “Simon Cowell of the fringe”,
plucking extremists from obscurity and
making them stars, but argues the influ-
ence that Fuentes and friends wield
over parts of the Trumpian right makes
them valid subjects. “In a weird way it
was simpler in the old days, when rac-
ists and skinheads wore swastikas and
were relatively powerless,” he says.
“They had no access to power.”
He also worries that Trumpian cur-
rents are beginning to run through Brit-
ain, describing Boris Johnson’s attempt
to link Keir Starmer to the failed prose-
cution of Jimmy Savile as “straight out of
the Trump playbook”. Unlike Starmer,
Theroux interviewed Savile in 2000,
raising the rumours of paedophilia and
being rebuffed. Now he’s concerned
about the story being weaponised and
saw “echoes of ” last January’s assault onIn an odd way it was
simpler in the old days,
when racists and
skinheads wore
swastikas and were
relatively powerless
No subject is too extreme for Louis Theroux — but now America’s unspeakables
voice on the internet it’s no wonder he fancies a quiet life presenting University
Seeking the strange Louis Theroux
plans to explore different avenuesEnd OF THE wEIrdEST
DAN DEWSBURY/BBCJOSH
GLANCY
10 13 February 2022