Early on in the latest episode of his uncharacteristically tepid interview podcast for Spotify, Louis Theroux makes his celebrity guest squirm. This was perhaps unavoidable, for Theroux’s guest is the Call Me by Your Name actor, and now rampant denier of cannibalism allegations, Armie Hammer. Theroux pushes him not only on the leaked text messages that suggested an erotic interest in consuming human flesh (a provocative joke, Hammer insists), but also the allegations of rape and sexual assault (consensual acts of non-consent, says Hammer) that engulfed the actor in 2021, effectively shuttering his movie career in the process.
“I’m not crazy about dredging up all of this stuff,” Hammer says at the end of the episode, released today. “For me, a lot of these issues have been resolved, whether it be legally or within myself. A lot of those waters have settled. [Talking about them] stirs up the water again unnecessarily.” Theroux, to his credit, stands his ground.
This lightly confrontational quality isn’t typical of Theroux right now. After rising to prominence with the sly, gawping docuseries Weird Weekends, Theroux made his bread and butter the discreetly probing documentary – nerdily umming and ahhing his way into often quite ghoulish truths, whether it involved living with the hate group known as the Westboro Baptist Church, or breaking bread with Jimmy Savile. (That encounter, notoriously, didn’t go as far as it probably should have – he’s since expressed regret.) But since 2022, Theroux has largely focused on celebrity interviews, as if to refashion himself as a kind of British Marc Maron – a US podcaster who welcomes stars into his home for often innocuous, sometimes revealing, chats about their lives and careers.
The problem, though, is that Theroux isn’t very good at this. The Louis Theroux Podcast, launched on Spotify and additional platforms in 2023, takes after his anodyne 2022 BBC series Louis Theroux Interviews, in which he chatted to stars including Stormzy, Bear Grylls, Rita Ora and Raye – individuals who are all fine at what they do, and occasionally interesting, but devoid of the anarchic mystery of, say, Max Clifford or Chris Eubank, oddball cultural figures whom Theroux famously interviewed in the early Noughties.
It would be easy to say that Theroux handles these new celebrities with kid gloves, but that would suggest a purposeful steering away from troublesome topics. Instead, he just seems slightly adrift in these conversations, regurgitating tired lines of questioning and feigning interest in whatever his guests tell him. His anxious unease, historically interpreted as a deliberate veil of cluelessness to disarm his interviewee, has been supplanted by a doddering actual cluelessness, which makes each conversation vaguely torturous. The podcast only accentuates these problems. Theroux excavates the biographies of younger stars such as Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, or the pop star PinkPantheress, but unearths little that hasn’t already been explored in one of their pre-existing interviews with a magazine.
Older stars don’t get off much better. His recent chat with Willem Dafoe felt unprepared and uncomfortable, Theroux sifting through an increasingly testy Dafoe’s greatest hits. “She dripped hot wax on your nipples?” he asked an already grumpy Dafoe at one point, in reference to his 1993 erotic thriller with Madonna, Body of Evidence. “Yeah, but that’s no big deal,” Dafoe replied, before pondering why Theroux was talking about a movie from more than 30 years ago that no one really remembers.
Similarly, Theroux has a conversational preoccupation with “the culture wars” and “cancellation”, but rarely appears to find them interesting as topics – if anything, he seems almost embarrassed to bring them up, as if forced to by committee. “It’s been brought to my attention that in a lot of these shows, I ask about Woody Allen ... or Harvey Weinstein, or [a guest’s] experience of either blacking up or browning up, or working with people who have browned up or blacked up, or their opinions on that,” he said during an interview with Sanjeev Bhaskar. “It’s become a kind of ... ‘Culture Wars Talking Point Bingo’.” At least he knows it, I suppose.
The podcast landscape as it stands only accentuates Theroux’s failings here. Shows in which celebrities interview celebrities are a dime a dozen right now, and Theroux’s hasn’t even got a central hook along the lines of Kathy Burke’s Where There’s a Will, There’s a Wake (in which stars talk about their fantasy funerals), or Ed Gamble and James Acaster’s Off Menu (in which stars discuss their favourite meals). The Louis Theroux Podcast is contrastingly rudderless, with focus-grouped guests and a host who is happy to acknowledge how mostly anodyne he’s become.
On a rare occasion when he was prodded on his current approach to interviews, in an episode last year with Tracey Emin, Theroux’s answers were illuminating. “I thought that being involved in TV and broadcasting meant being adversarial,” he told Emin. “And I had the attitude that a lot of TV was corrupt because it was overly safe and onside, and therefore not quite honest. But nowadays I don’t think that ... I think perhaps I have maybe mellowed a bit.”
It’s an ethos that, for the most part, has produced pleasing if plodding audio noise far beneath the standard of everything we know and love about Louis Theroux. Thank God, then, for the Armie Hammer episode, with Theroux quick to ask him difficult questions and eager to cut through Hammer’s penchant for therapy speak (the actor namedrops Carl Jung and the writer Joseph Campbell, and at one point compares himself, metaphorically, to a beach ball). There’s still a sense that Theroux isn’t yet at ease with the podcast format, only at the very end of the Hammer episode attempting to pull together loose threads about sexual assault, the “manosphere”, masturbation and cancel culture that all really needed more time to properly ferment. But Theroux is generally focused and erudite, refusing to bow to Hammer’s obvious discomfort.
Perhaps, though, the success of the Hammer episode is because the actor is just a lot more interesting than the bulk of Theroux’s guests so far – Hammer’s rise and fall is objectively fascinating, the line between consensual non-consent (as Hammer claims) and actual non-consent (as his accuser claims) undeniably rich with complication. A nice chat with Ben Elton just isn’t going to produce the same material. Theroux, then, hasn’t lost his magic. For some reason, he’s just not been using it.
‘The Louis Theroux Podcast’ is available on Spotify now
