TV’S MR COOL LOUIS THEROUX ON LOCKDOWN LIFE I drank lots of alcohol & once raged at the kids so loudly I thought I’d broken my vocal cords
Picturing Louis Theroux screaming at his kids at the top of his voice is like imagining Piers Morgan gently singing a lullaby. For nearly three decades the documentary maker has prised nuggets of TV gold from some of the planet’s most unpredictable characters with his unobtrusively disarming interview style.
The double BAFTA winner has probed subjects as challenging as Jimmy Savile, Tiger King’s Joe Exotic, furious white supremacists and secretive Scientologists with barely a raised voice.
Yet the calmest presence on TV admits to bouts of rage during lockdown at home with his wife and three kids.
He says: “On one occasion the kids were just acting up and I just lost my s**t royally and I found that for two or three days subsequently I couldn’t speak. I could whisper but that was it.
“I thought I’d broken my vocal cords, and for a while I wondered whether I might never be able to be in broadcasting again.”
Louis, 51, says: “As much as I’d like to be poised and reflective and to be a considered, mature and rather humorous individual in every aspect of my life, the reality is that I’m just as rageprone as everyone else.”
Like millions of other adults derailed by the lack of a routine he also found himself turning to alcohol for comfort.
Forced into a professional hiatus, Louis started keeping a diary at the beginning of the first lockdown last year at his North London home with wife Nancy and their three children Albert, 15, Frederick, 13, and six-year-old Walter.
The result is his candid memoir Theroux the Keyhole, which details his daily struggles juggling family and work life during with the pandemic.
He says: “When you’re at home, it all comes out. There’s no hiding. I think the expression is, ‘No man is a hero to his valet’. The people in your home, in your bedroom, in your bathroom, in your kitchen, in your front room – more or less 24 hours a day during lockdown – they know you, warts and all.”
So what triggered his surprising bout of voice-wrecking wrath? “Most of the time I was pretty chilled out,” he says. “But there were occasions where I was trying to home-school my six-year-old, who was five at the time, whilst doing some work at the same time. And then his app malfunctioned, and he was getting bored and then suddenly I got this strange sensation of sudden rage.
“It wasn’t a wake-up call exactly, but it was an embarrassing incident, and a strange passage of time.
“But it made me feel I wanted to own up to being every bit as maladapted and irritable and embarrassing as I am behind the scenes.”
This included opening up about his lockdown drinking.
Louis says: “If you looked inside me you might notice the wear and tear on my liver due to excessive drinking in lockdown. I definitely drank my way through the pandemic, and I actually enjoyed drinking too much.
“I don’t see it as, ‘Oh, my drinking got
I wanted to own up to being irritable and maladapted LOUIS THEROUX ON HIS WARTS-AND-ALL BOOK
away from me’, it was more the case that I found it was one of the ways I could enjoy myself. Days of the week became indistinguishable, so I would wobble into the front room to see what my wife Nancy was watching on TV and then she’d notice I was laughing too much at Doctor Who, and she’d say, ‘Louis, you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’
“She’d say, ‘Louis, it’s a Monday’, and I’d say, ‘And your point is?’”
Despite the boozing and tantrums, Louis says the pandemic allowed him to make a much-needed reconnection with his family. “The main thing I’ve taken from the last 18 months is a sense of resetting my place in the world with respect to my family,” he says.
Exercise also brought the Theroux
It’s slightly ludicrous to see myself as a national treasure LOUIS THEROUX TALKS ABOUT HIS PUBLIC IMAGE
clan closer, with Joe Wicks playing the role of virtual personal trainer. Louis says: “We were with Joe from the first day of his family workout, jumping around doing our mountain climbers and sit-ups and crunches – I’m still doing them. I got up at 6.20am this morning and did a 15-minute workout with Joe, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m ripped.
“And how many packs I’ve got is open to debate, depending on how much I’ve eaten and what time of day it is, but I’m definitely leaner than I was and mentally I feel much better.”
Louis’s increasingly chiselled physique will do no harm to his status as one of TV’s unlikeliest sex symbols, but he refuses to be seduced by the compliments. described as a sex symbol is not something I really think about very much,” he says. “It’s nice to hear that, and very flattering, but I think when you’re on TV people see you in your best light and you can’t take it too seriously. To some extent, the person you see on TV is a confection.
“I used to make a joke that a bit like Homer, the poet, Louis Theroux was a collection of people who’d created Louis Theroux through producing and editing and careful management, because the person you see on TV is not unmediated Louis.”
It is this sort of self-deprecation that edged Theroux towards national treasure status during lockdown. His Grounded podcasts, in he interviewed celebrities including Boy George and David Tennant, kept millions of fans entertained.
He says: “In the book I call myself, ‘the Dame Vera Lynn of lockdown podcasting’ as a way of acknowledging the slightly ludicrous quality of seeing myself as a national treasure in a time of crisis. Of course, I’m really pleased when I make something that connects with people, but you can’t take it too seriously.”
So how far removed is the TV Louis from the real Louis?
“It’s pretty close,” he says. “I’m both probably funnier, but also less funny in private, in the sense that I’m more unguarded and might be more risque.
“But I’m also liable to be kind of selfinvolved and probably a bit preten“Being tious. I try to dial that back on TV because no one wants to see me geeking out on books I’ve read.
“Probably to my kids I’m loving but also sometimes grumpy and tediously authoritarian, like trying to ration their screen time.
“To my wife I’m probably selfinvolved, a bad listener, forgetful, liable to not do the thing she’s asked me to do, and overly work-focused.
“To my mum and dad, I’m probably non-communicative, a little bit distant and insufficiently considerate of what’s going on with them.
“Across the board I’ve probably got all the failings most people who read this have, in quite a boring way.”
His family keep him grounded despite huge success writing, presenting and producing groundwhich breaking documentary series including Louis’s Weird Weekends, When Louis Met… and his featurelength 2016 My Scientology Movie.
He says: “From what I can tell my kids are wonderfully uninterested in my programmes. They know I’m on TV and they know that when we’re out and about people will ask for a selfie, but as far as being a figure of any cultural significance to them – no.
“I get a lot of, ‘Dad, you’re so cringe’. Or, ‘Look at your hair, Dad, you look like a homeless mad professor’.
“I’m the lowest in the pecking order in the family except for my six-yearold who still thinks I’m a bit of a hero.
“The important thing is that I’m their dad, and I’m there for them, in the fullest sense of what that means – and I’m happy with that.”
Theroux The Keyhole, published by Macmillan, is out now.