The fourth season of Louis Theroux‘s podcast launches today with a free-wheeling chat between the off-beat British documentary maker and Hollywood star Willem Dafoe. Famous names Armie Hammer, Jade Thirlwall, Sharon Horgan and Jamie Oliver also appear in this run of The Louis Theroux Podcast, but given Theroux’s propensity for choosing complicated, divisive interview subjects, Deadline wonders if he is still attempting to attract a certain Elon Musk.
“I would 100% have him on,” says Theroux, talking from his London home via Zoom late last week. “I remember I half tongue-in-cheek and half for real sent a tweet out — and it was a tweet because it was before X — directed at him, saying, ‘Come on, Elon, come on the podcast. What are you afraid of?’ I’m sure it got lost in the cascade of his mentions, but he’s that kind of a guy that you never know.”
Theroux is known for a disarming style that allows him to connect with controversial and difficult personalities. With Musk about to become a key advisor to Donald Trump’s White House and meddling in European politics, many now see the X and Tesla owner as someone who embodies either the destroyer or the savior of the Western world. “I find him endlessly interesting,” says Theroux. “He’s obviously been on a political journey.”
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Theroux and Musk’s common ground probably exists on a slightly different level of discourse. “I’ve read the Walter Isaacson biography and the New York Times article that talked about him being a big fan of comedy,” he says. “I wouldn’t say that I know he’s seen my programs, but if someone said he is a big fan of Weird Weekends, I wouldn’t be surprised. He has an orientation towards the UK, which may be part of his South African upbringing, and he is a consumer of off-beat comedy. I would love to have him on.”
Theroux says having views that many find extreme or wrong does not disqualify them from being valid interview subjects. “Is it appropriate to platform someone? Well, if they already have one of the biggest platforms in the world, it’s not like I’m adding an extra weight to their visibility,” he adds. “The risk feels somewhat removed from my shoulders. Musk is already one of the most visible people on the planet. It would be an opportunity to understand what his mindset is, and what is behind this endless trolling he seems to be involved with.”
So does he think hosting an interview podcast comes with the responsibility to call out falsehoods — trolling or conspiracies — or is it better to let people expose themselves?
“It’s not an exact science, and it’s a bit of both,” says Theroux. “That is a question I ask myself, and I don’t think it’s always easy to get right. I do think you have to push back a bit in the room, but you don’t want to push back to the point where the guest is barely saying anything. With Musk in particular, because he is given so much space and has driven so much conversation around grooming gangs among other things in a way that is so unhealthy for civic society and our sense of ourselves as a culture, the very least you can do is attempt to set the record straight.”
He recalls how Season 3 guest Nick Kyrgios, the Australian tennis player, had claimed the pyramids were not built by humans and that the first space flight went to the moon. Theroux challenged the first assertion (“No disrespect to Nick; I liked his vibe, but on that point I strongly disagree”), but let the second go, before using the program outro to set the record straight that there were several crewed and non-crewed missions before the moon expedition.
Dafoe kicks off Season 4
Season 4 of The Louis Theroux Podcast kicks off today with a conversation with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Nosferatu star Dafoe. “It’s very much a free-ranging chat about a person with a unique place in movie culture, half-in and half-out of Hollywood,” says Theroux. “He’s just got an extraordinary way of working — he spends a lot of his time in Italy. He said he’s never led a TV program, because he doesn’t find it an interesting medium. It’s so old school and beautiful that he is so absolute about the arts, but not in a precious way. He will make a superhero movie and follow up with an indie film.”
It’s not like there are no controversial figures appearing on his latest pod run, however. Theroux has recorded an episode with Hammer, who has been attempting career rehab after allegations of sexual abuse against women led to a police investigation back in 2021. The Call Me By Your Name star recently claimed he was turning down work after returning to acting and launching his own show, The Armie HammerTime Podcast.
“The question of where he is on the comeback is an interesting one,” says Theroux. “He has just wrapped his first film, a relatively low-budget indie film, and also has his podcast. It’s nearly eight years since #MeToo and the landscape has change quite a lot, and I still think we don’t quite know the trajectories of people who have been accused of doing predatory acts. I don’t quite know how that plays out.”
Theroux says he and his production team had “conversations at our end about what our responsibilities were, given the allegations,” but that it ended with “a revealing conversation that listeners and viewers will have to judge,” with “spiky and awkward” moments.
Theroux says he has observed public and private discourse have come to be very different things, with those who may support alleged offenders often staying quiet. He has developed his own acid test for actors to gauge where they are culturally and politically. “I’ll often ask if they’d make a movie with Woody Allen, just to test the waters,” he explains. “Quite often, they say they already have.”
Last week, it emerged another high-profile British interviewer, Piers Morgan, was splitting with Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV and taking ownership of his Uncensored politics and current affairs show. Given their markedly different styles, approaches and views, it’s somewhat surprising to hear him praise his counterpart.
“I’ve been watching what Piers Morgan is doing and I’m impressed by how quickly he is able to put up these interviews that speak to things happening here and now,” he says. “I was curious about the business side of what TalkTV was getting out of [the partnership]. He was getting about 10,000 viewers on TalkTV and then videos online would sometimes be getting 2-3 million. It wasn’t a TV show with a web presence; it was a web show with a tiny TV presence.
“What I do like is he’s a creature of legacy media who has adapted really well to the YouTube landscape and has actually put out some very strong interviews. Obviously, I’m not that guy who aspires to be the host of a chat show. At my heart, I’m a documentary presenter, whatever the fuck that is.”
Developing relationship with podcasting
Having begun TV life as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s show TV Nation in the mid-1990s, Theroux became known for his unusual BBC documentaries such as Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and When Louis Met… leading to memorable encounters with the likes of Jimmy Savile, politicians Neil and Christine Hamilton and members of the Westboro Baptist Church. He has continued to make shows for the BBC ever since, though the launch of his own production biz, Mindhouse Productions, in 2019 led to more work away from the pubcaster.
A recent report in The Sun newspaper revealed his Louis Theroux Interviews series for the BBC is coming to an end “for the foreseeable future.” He confirms this is the case, saying that now The Louis Theroux Podcast was filmed and streamed exclusively on Spotify, it was an awkward fit to have a similar format on television. “They don’t sit that well alongside each other, but what I got from the article was that I am not making programs for the BBC anymore, which is not true,” he clarifies. “The bottom line is I am still making programs for the BBC — I am making a documentary for the BBC at the moment. I also make programs outside the BBC, and am making a documentary [for another platform] at the moment. We’ve put that to bed, haven’t we?”
He isn’t saying much more about his upcoming projects, but Mindhouse currently has Darts Kings and Lockerbie at Sky, and BBC doc Boybands Forever. Other notable docs since launch have included BBC sport docs Gods of Snooker and Gods of Tennis, Prime Video feature KSI: In Real Life, Channel 4 series Sex Actually With Alice Levine, Louis Theroux: Shooting Joe Exotic and Rylan: How to be in the Spotlight. It’s a strong catalog for a relatively young company, but life has been tough for UK independent producers — even ones with Louis Theroux, his wife Nancy Strang and former BBC producer Arron Fellows as their leaders.
“We’re just pleased to still be in business, because the environment has been very unforgiving,” says Theroux, offering an analysis of the market. “It feels as though there’s been this evisceration of the industry, and a lot of it is to do with streaming and specifically phones, social media, TikTok, Instagram Reels and people making content themselves.
“In some ways that’s a beautiful thing and it is exciting. I have kids so I can see how habits are changing, but for those who came up in TV making when there were five channels and a few more on cable, it is quite an adaptation. We have tried to stay true to what we believe in and what we’re good at. Not to sound really basic, but that means make good programs, documentaries that challenge and provoke, and trust the audience will be there for them.”
Theroux has in the past also talked about moving into scripted — a long-held ambition. Back in the late 1990s, he dedicated a few months to writing sitcom scripts in L.A. He admits he is “talking to a few people about it,” but it sounds likes that’s the closest he’s gotten so far. “I’ve always enjoyed those shows like Succession, The White Lotus, Happy Valley and Baby Reindeer. I would love to work on something like that, but it is not imminent.”
Podcast future
Mindhouse makes The Louis Theroux Podcast for Spotify, the show’s partner since launch. Theroux says “the feeling of it unfolding as an experience first and a product or program second” is what makes podcasting similar to his unique documentary-making style — more guerrilla than the polished process of most unscripted television or feature films.
“I’ve never had a great deal of love for the process of lighting an interview or thought too hard about camera angles or format points. I really like to surrender to an experience,” he says. “I don’t know what that makes me sound like.”
The performative aspect of podcast hosting has taken more acclimatization — “as I get older, I’m more comfortable with that, but that wasn’t what got me into making programs in the first place,” says Theroux — but it is ultimately the thrill of the unknown that keeps driving him. “Why I have any kind of profile in documentary making is you can feel the enjoyment of me being present and playing with contributors and interviewees. Sometimes that’s awkward and sometimes that’s fun. At lot of people in the last run of the podcast responded to the Barry Keoghan episode, and I think the audience numbers bear that out. It was very far from being a classical interview.”
Not that he his interviews his subjects blind, far from it, in fact. “I have to get the respect from having gone pretty deep into their work, and have an idea of what I find interesting about them. After that I let it unfold. I will say that I still find the process of making a podcast in some ways more stressful. There’s a bit more on my shoulders. You have one shot, like Eminem once said.”
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