Documentarian, writer and broadcaster Louis Theroux was born in Singapore in 1970. After graduating from Oxford he moved to America, where he worked as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s news series TV Nation. Since 1998 he has presented documentaries for the BBC, including Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, covering fringe communities across the US, and interview series When Louis Met…. In 2016 he released the documentary My Scientology Movie and during lockdown started the podcast Grounded with Louis Theroux. His latest, The Louis Theroux Podcast, is available to stream on Spotify, with new episodes every Tuesday.
1. Theatre
Guys & Dolls, Bridge theatre, London
Recently my mum suggested we go to this as a family – I love a good musical. I saw a production when I was about 13 so I know the words to many of the songs, which is a party trick no one is interested in experiencing. It’s about two ne’er-do-well gamblers who are both in relationships complicated by the fact the men won’t commit. Daniel Mays is extraordinary in it. At the end it turns into a kind of nightclub and you end up grooving around with the actors. I like that feeling with immersive theatre where the barrier between audience and performer is porous.
2. Film
I love horror films. When my wife and I are looking for a bit of escapism we will either go to the cinema or watch one at home. This is a mystery horror set in Detroit, and like the best horror films it’s about jump scares and creepy atmosphere, but also about something deeper, which is to do with the way fear and paranoia can exist in relatively banal places. It’s really about relationships between men and women – about the patriarchy, for want of a better term. Every moment feels tense and filled with fear.
3. Music
To me, Afrobeats feels like the freshest music, specifically artists like Burna Boy, who I saw at Glastonbury last year, Wizkid and Rema, who did the track Calm Down with Selena Gomez. At weekends I like to do a bit of cooking – a bolognese or macaroni cheese, or baking – and it’s the perfect time to listen to something you haven’t heard before. So you can put on a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm be your DJ, and you’ll be taken down a path of infectious, irresistible African-inflected rhythms that are both propulsive and melodic – pure pleasure, basically.
4. Podcast
Jon’s always been an inspiration going back years. His books are always terrific, and now he’s bringing his literary storytelling skill set to podcasting, as he did with The Butterfly Effect and The Last Days of August. The Debutante is an account of a young woman born to privilege who drifts into the world of the far right, and ends up at a fundamentalist white racist compound called Elohim City in Oklahoma. There are lots of twists and turns and possible conspiracies, and Jon, shining his journalistic light on it, goes on a classically Ronson-esque journey through this neo-Nazi netherworld.
5. Book
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy
Jeanette McCurdy was a child star on two Nickelodeon shows, iCarly and Sam & Cat. Basically it was her mum who pushed her into show business, and she’s at best ambivalent and at worst deeply resentful of the whole experience. Along the way, partly as a result of the stress of being in that world, and partly the toxic relationship with her mum, she developed an eating disorder and a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. And her life gets extremely messy. She writes brilliantly: the storytelling is compulsive and funny, but totally unstinting in laying bare those aspects of her life.
6. TV
This is made by Nathan Fielder, who made Nathan for You, a business-themed prank show. This new series defies description, but essentially he helps people with their daily dilemmas by setting up a rigorous, almost insanely elaborate series of rehearsals involving actors and sets – he does a replica of a pub – and then drills them on how to deal with difficult conversations. And over the course of the series he gets sucked into his own stunt. It becomes an investigation of the nature of TV and maybe of reality in general. It’s troubling, funny, weird and compelling.
