Louis Theroux

Louis Sebastian Theroux (born 20 May 1970) is a British-American documentarian, journalist, broadcaster, and author.

He has received three British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award.

After graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, Theroux moved to the United States and worked as a journalist for Metro Silicon Valley and Spy.

He moved into television as the presenter of offbeat segments on Michael Moore's TV Nation series.

Louis Sebastian Theroux was born in Singapore on 20 May 1970, the son of English mother Anne (née Castle) and American father Paul Theroux, a noted travel writer and novelist.

His paternal grandmother, Anne Dittami, was an Italian-American grammar school teacher, while his paternal grandfather, Albert Eugène Theroux, was a French-Canadian salesman for the American Leather Oak company.

Theroux holds dual British and American citizenship.

He is the nephew of novelist Alexander Theroux and writer Peter Theroux.

His older brother, Marcel, is a writer and television presenter.

His cousin, Justin, is an actor and screenwriter.

Theroux moved with his family to England when he was one year old, and was raised in the Catford area of south London.

He went from primary school to Tower House School in East Sheen in 1979 or 1980 and then to Westminster School, a public school within the precincts of Westminster Abbey.

There, he befriended comedians Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, and future Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, with whom he travelled to America.

He also performed in a number of school theatre productions including Bugsy Malone as Looney Bergonzi, Ritual for Dolls as the Army Officer, and The Splendour Falls as the Minstrel.

He read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford (1988–1991), graduating with first-class honours.

Theroux's first employment as a journalist was in the United States with Metro Silicon Valley, an alternative free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California.

In 1992, he was hired as a writer for Spy. He also worked as a correspondent on Michael Moore's TV Nation series, for which he provided segments on offbeat cultural subjects, including selling Avon to women in the Amazon Rainforest, the Jerusalem syndrome, and attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people.

When TV Nation ended, Theroux signed a development deal with the BBC, where he developed Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends.

He has written for a number of publications, including Hip Hop Connection and The Idler.

Theroux is known for his numerous documentaries with the BBC, beginning with Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends (1998–2000), followed by When Louis Met... (2000–2002) and 50 BBC Two specials (2003–present).

His work includes studies of unusual and taboo subcultures, crime and the justice system, and celebrities.

The majority of his documentaries are set in the United States, but he has also studied cultures in South Africa, Israel, Nigeria, and the UK.

The New Yorker described Theroux's work as "a piercingly humane, slyly funny guide through the funkier passages of American culture".

In Weird Weekends (1998–2000), Theroux followed marginal (mostly American) subcultures such as survivalists, black nationalists, white supremacists, and porn stars, often by living among or close to the people who were involved in them.

His documentary method subtly exposes the contradictions or farcical elements of his subjects' seriously held beliefs.

He described the aim of Weird Weekends as:

"Setting out to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting. To me, it's almost a privilege to be welcomed into these communities and to shine a light on them and, maybe, through my enthusiasm, to get people to reveal more of themselves than they may have intended. The show is laughing at me, adrift in their world, as much as at them. I don't have to play up that stuff. I'm not a matinee idol disguised as a nerd."

In the series When Louis Met... (2000–02), Theroux accompanied a different British celebrity in each programme in their daily lives, interviewing them as they go.

In these special programmes, beginning in 2003, Theroux returned to American themes, working at feature-length and in a more natural way.

His episode about British entertainer Jimmy Savile, entitled When Louis Met Jimmy, was voted one of the top documentaries of all time in a 2005 survey by Britain's Channel 4.

Some years after the episode was filmed, the NSPCC described Savile as one of the most prolific sex offenders in Great Britain.

In March 2006, he signed a new deal with the BBC to make 10 films over the course of three years.

Subjects for the specials include criminal gangs in Lagos, Neo-Nazis in America, ultra-Zionists in Israel.

In an interview in 2015, Theroux expressed his intention to produce a follow-up documentary about Savile for the BBC to explore how the late entertainer had continued his abuse for so long, to meet people he knew closely, and examine his own reflections on his inability to dig more deeply into the first case.

This follow-up documentary, with the title Savile, aired on BBC Two on Sunday, 2 October 2016, and lasted 1 hour, 15 minutes.

In When Louis Met the Hamiltons, the former Conservative MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine were arrested during the course of filming, due to false allegations of indecent assault.

In When Louis Met Max Clifford, Max Clifford tried to set up Theroux, but he was caught lying as the crew recorded his live microphone during the conversations.

After this series concluded, a retrospective called Life with Louis was released.

Theroux made a documentary called Louis, Martin & Michael about his quest to get an interview with Michael Jackson to which he lost out to Martin Bashir who went on to make the documentary Living With Michael Jackson.

Selected episodes of When Louis Met... were included as bonus content on a Best-Of collection of Weird Weekends.