It’s been over 30 years since Louis Theroux was first given an opportunity to make documentaries as a reporter on Michael Moore’s TV Nation.
Since then Theroux has become the preeminent documenter of the weird, the extreme, and the dangerous, filming everyone from members of the Westboro Baptist Church to ultra-Zionists in the West Bank.
But in Inside the Manosphere, his first film with Netflix, out March 11, Theroux is tackling what he only somewhat jokingly describes to WIRED as “the final boss battle in the gamified career of Louis Theroux.”
“I’ve been circling this subject” for years, Theroux tells WIRED from the Squid Game meeting room in Netflix’s London headquarters. “It combines cultlike groupings, misogyny, adult content, creation of pornographic content, and obviously racism. All these taboo areas of life that I’ve spent my TV work documenting in different forms come together in the manosphere.”
Theroux says he was drawn to the subject not just because of how pervasive and influential it is, but also the challenge of filming subjects who are in turn filming you and turning your presence into content that boosts their channels.
The manosphere is a broad description for a category of online figures that incorporates everyone from über-podcaster Joe Rogan to health and fitness content creators and crypto bros. For his documentary, Theroux focused on the extreme edges of the manosphere that push racist and misogynistic content to lure in young viewers.
“The aim isn’t just to push toxic content,” says Theroux. “That, in a sense, is the entryway, that’s the front door through which they get people’s attention. But the aim is to engage young boys, especially, and get them to buy their products, their slightly crappy FX trading products or their so-called online universities. It’s a rather cynical grift.”
He has in the past touched the manosphere world, filming with convicted January 6 insurrectionist Anthime Gionet (aka Baked Alaska) and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
“We went into this as an opportunity to explore a world that’s increasingly influential” says Theroux. “This has scale and reach beyond anything I’ve looked at of comparable extremeness … There are tens of millions of people who are watching this content. It’s an important subject.”
To make his point, Theroux spent time with HSTikkyTokky, a British influencer whose real name is Harrison Sullivan, and American manosphere superstar Sneako (real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy), who attended President Donald Trump’s most recent inauguration. He also spends time with Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl), a prominent host of the Fresh and Fit podcast, and Justin Waller, a Miami-based influencer.
But there was one manosphere character Theroux was unable to convince to take part: Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer who has been charged with rape in multiple countries. (He has also been charged with human trafficking in the UK; he has denied all allegations.)
Tate, along with his brother Tristan, has become among the most recognizable faces of the manosphere movement, earning huge sums of money from tens of millions of followers.
When Theroux messaged Tate about the possibility of spending some time with him, he says Tate responded: “I’m the most relevant man on the planet. And who are you? You were relevant years ago?”
Tate then followed up with a screenshot of Google Trends that showed a blue line at the top of the graph indicating search interest in Tate over time and a red line along the bottom of the graph showing interest in Theroux over the same period, according to Theroux.
“So his blue one was, sure enough, quite high all the way along,” Theroux says. “And mine was like, down near death. But then the funny thing was, at the very end, mine picked up and actually overtook his. I was like: ‘Dude, I’m actually more relevant than you are. Look at your own screenshot.’” Theroux said Tate didn’t respond when this was pointed out.
Gaines, Sullivan, Tate, Waller, and De Balinthazy did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
Theroux spoke to WIRED about how and why the manosphere works, how he dealt with being filmed by his subjects, and how ultimately this all comes back to money. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Gilbert: You’ve said you’ve been circling this topic for years, so did you predict how influential the manosphere would become?
Louis Theroux: I didn’t see it coming. I was on Joe Rogan 10 years ago, and it was a relatively big podcast, but I wasn’t under the impression that it was going to become a main engine of political culture. I think if I was smarter than I am, I would have predicted that, based on a world where the traditional portals have been discredited, legacy media is viewed with a great deal of suspicion. Meanwhile, on social media, on podcasts, on YouTube, you have this flourishing of a kind of lowest-common-denominator style of content.
Why is the manosphere so successful?
I sometimes make the metaphor that everything’s become pornography. Extreme content feels like political pornography, and a lot of Instagram feels to me like emotional pornography. It’s this feeling that whatever is going to drive your most basic, most primal emotional responses, that’s what will get engagement. And once you notice that, and you see how, OK, so that’s going to actually become pervasive, and this extreme and toxic and lowest-common-denominator indoctrination will just be rampant across people’s social media feeds. That part of our brain, the amygdala, that is responsible for decisionmaking—it feels like that most primitive part of our thinking has been hooked up with the most powerful, most high-tech forms of content dissemination. And in concert, we created a nonstop Las Vegas–style media feed that’s actually now bleeding into the power centers in Washington and elsewhere.
Throughout the documentary, your subjects are also filming you, sharing clips online to their followers. What challenges did that present?
I definitely went into it knowing and expecting they would be streaming me, but I saw that as an opportunity. Not to say it wasn’t awkward, because it was. It was embarrassing at times, in sort of anodyne ways, like seeing how hard I could punch a punching bag and failing miserably. And then later, when there were these kinds of political gotchas, where just because I happened to pause, it was characterized as in some way weak or dishonest. If I can spin that as a positive, though, that’s really educational for me personally but also as a sort of exercise in understanding how media works in this world where everyone’s streaming all the time.
What shines through in most of your interactions in the documentary is how important money is to many of these influencers.
The most revealing interview [HSTikkyTokky] gave was probably the one where I visited him a second time and he wasn’t streaming. He’s having breakfast, and we’re filming, so he is, in a sense, performing, but his manner is quite different. And he gives these considered answers to questions about why he does what he does. I ask him why doesn’t he just try and do the right thing, why not consider the moral outcome of your decisions and how they affect people. And he says ‘No, I’m just about money.’ I ask again wouldn’t he like to, sometimes, be the better person? And he goes: ‘It’s a good question, but truthfully, if I’d been the better person, I wouldn’t have blown up. I’d just be anonymously working somewhere. I wouldn’t have all this fame on the internet.’ So, in other words, it served him very well. It’s highly profitable to be a dick on the internet.
It’s all pretty depressing isn’t it?
There were definitely times when you say, ‘wow, we are living in the end of days’, like this is horrific. But there’s a paradox, which is that many of them are performing their horrificness. You see someone like Myron Gaines, and he says horrific, abhorrent things about women, and then you see him with his girlfriend, and you’re like, OK, so it’s not really real, he’s actually relatively tender with his girlfriend, or she seems quite nice, and it feels like, oh, you’re just performing your alphaness, you know? And that’s kind of, in a weird way, quite heartening, not altogether surprising, either.
So is this just a game?
There’s definitely an element of pretending to be horrific in order to get people to engage. But what makes it more difficult is that there is also horrific stuff happening. I don’t think it’s coincidental that Andrew Tate has the cases that he does. I also think that when you are performing being horrific, there comes a time when you’re just horrific. I wouldn’t in any way want to trivialize what they’re doing. It’s like the kids say: ‘But it’s a joke.’ But certain things, you do them as a joke, and there’s not really a meaningful difference. If you spew racist commentary as a joke, it doesn’t always get you off the hook.
Did you make this documentary with a particular audience in mind?
I just make programs that I think I’d enjoy, and I don’t think too hard about who they’re for. This is for people who might see HSTikkyTokky on their feed, maybe some who even like a lot of that content, and then also for parents, also for anyone who’s curious about this weird landscape that we inhabit, people curious about the culture in general, the ways in which the people in power seem to be influenced by certain manosphere talking points. If you are curious or especially if you’re raising kids, or you are young yourself, and you’re consuming the content, then it’s helpful to know what’s happening.
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