Louis Theroux has been to some of the world’s strangest places, and now he’s finally packing his bags for his first visit to Australia.
The hit documentary-maker will arrive early next week to embark on his inaugural speaking tour, and there’s one thing the king of the weird is eager to learn about in return.
“There’s a lot of talk about the assimilation of migrants,” he told news.com.au. “Whether there’s a rubbing point with native cultures, or with Asia … all that stuff will be grist to my mill.”
The country’s “wide open spaces” are also a source of intrigue for the British TV personality.
“I’ve been really drawn to the Australian landscape as I am in the American West,” he says. “Vast open spaces where people seek to reinvent themselves.
“The outback — a place where people can pursue their dreams and find their destiny in weird and wonderful ways. Maybe the trip will be a recce.”
Whatever happens to Louis Down Under, you can be sure it will be interesting.
The journalist makes a point of immersing himself in his stories, and while the results are often highly unexpected, they always make for great television.
So what’s the weirdest story the 46-year-old has made to date?
“It’s hard to measure what weird is,” muses the father of three, who started out as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s TV Nation and made his name with his own BBC series exploring American subcultures, Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.
“Scientology is up there. After years of being fascinated by Scientology, the Hollywood church, I finally made a film [currently on limited release in Australian cinemas].
“The weird thing is how normal they are.It’s not just about being disconnected from reality, it has to be grounded.
“I met a man in a mental hospital who thought he was Barack Obama. It’s far weirder for one of Hollywood’s top actors to subscribe to a religion created by a science-fiction writer.
“It’s that contrast of the normal, even glamorous, and the deeply odd.”
Theroux is always seeking to travel outside his comfort zone. He’s found himself in a riot in Lagos, been tear-gassed on the West Bank and wrestled with professional fighters until he was physically sick.
“That certainly gets your pulse racing, but I’m not really a danger freak,” he insists. “There are people who do that sort of journalism much better than I do.
“In a way you take a risk more by doing stories that take you to the outer edge of taste and morality.”
His (clothed) appearance in a gay porn film was “more to immerse myself in that world in an unconventional way,” he says, although he did strip off for the casting agent.
For Theroux, it’s meeting people whose lifestyles are “confusing or deeply wrong” that is more confronting, whether it’s sex offenders in LA or paedophiles in a mental hospital.
“In a weird way I exposed more of myself in those programs,” he says. “I try to make connections. Even if someone’s a paedophile, murderer, convicted rapist, I try to ask cheeky questions.
“It draws you up short when you know what someone’s done, when it’s something appalling, like they’ve molested their own kid or murdered someone.
“They can seem rather likeable. There’s a conflict between what your mind is telling you and the emotional connection.
“You can relate to people as humans even if they’ve done something terrible.
“That’s where the program’s at its most interesting.”
While his methods can backfire and offend people, his self-deprecating manner has largely proved a winning formula for getting unusual people to open up.
“I think it’s mainly real but we all have different modes,” he says. “In work we put our best face on, especially in an industry where you work with people. I’m aware of the need to be polite and get questions answered, not be aggressive but sensitive.
“In the early days I was maybe bumbling a bit more, I was a bit more tongue in cheek, I played up that naive, maybe slightly disingenuous side.”
But the writer and filmmaker says it’s his job to make people answer the questions to which he believes he already knows the answer.
At times, Theroux has had to question himself. He recently revisited the story of Jimmy Savile, which he covered in his 2000 When Louis Met… series, digging out the rushes and talking to the TV star’s abuse victims.
After filming, the journalist reported the BBC DJ to his bosses for a “credible allegation” that Savile had had sex with a 15-year-old girl, yet he remained on good terms with the man who was later exposed as one of Britain’s worst paedophiles.
“The idea that someone that I more or less knew and kept in touch with after I made the program was unmasked as a paedophile and predatory rapistwas a huge shock I’ve been attempting to think through and make sense of.”
Theroux’s disarming politeness is certainly not an act. He apologises for stumbling over his words, and asks his media representative to give us a few more minutes because of a short interruption midway through our chat.
“TV itself is quite a lonely job,” he confesses, describing how he watches his show in his living room with his wife. “You have no sense of the audience.
“I’ve done Q&As and talks and there’s this wonderful connection. You realise there’s an audience out there. I feel invigorated and enthused.”
He’s looking forward to revisiting clips and recalling stories from the road.
“Weird as it is, I’m sort of a fan of my own show.”
Get tickets to Louis Theroux’s speaking tour of Australia at Louis Theroux Live.
