History Creator / LouisTheroux

In 2022, he became an unlikely OneHitWonder when a rap he recorded for a documentary in 2000 was remixed and went viral on Website/TikTok before before becoming a hit single.

* ChronicVillainy: One of the saddest part of the ''Behind Bars'' documentary is one of the correctional officers telling Louis that most of the convicts who are paroled tend to go back to prison in the future. There usually isn't an efficient support system to facilitate a succesful reintegration into society and ultimately people are just creatures of habit.

* NoPronunciationGuide: American subjects of the documentaries often mispronounce Louis's name, not realising it is French. The most common pronunciation is saying his first name as 'Lou-is' instead of 'Lou-ie', and more hilariously, pronouncing "Theroux" as "Thee-rux" or "Theh-row" instead of "Ther-roo". Though off-camera, Louis tells them the correct way to say his name, their original attempts are often left in for RuleOfFunny.

* CamWhore: Louis visited a camgirl as part of his documentary ''Twilight of the Porn Stars''. The girl in question (Kagney Linn Karter) was also a porn starlet who appeared in conventionally distributed adult films, which is a pretty common form of crossover in the industry.

* EmasculatedCuckold: Louis brings this up while interviewing a female pornstar and her boyfriend. He asks her if she thinks it's hard on her boyfriend that she's being paid to have sex on camera with other men, even gangbangs. She counters that her boyfriend doesn't have a job and often spends all day playing videogames, so he's not in a position to complain. They don't describe their own sex life in any detail, but her behavior suggests she's not very happy with her career and that her boyfriend is basically a LivingEmotionalCrutch.

** In the autism episode, one of the main teenagers he interviews brings up Louis's page at Wiki/{{Wikipedia}}, and jokingly reveals several aspects of Louis's past that he didn't exactly want to be made public knowledge (or at least, any more than they already were).

In 2022, he became an unlikely OneHitWonder when a rap he recorded for a documentary in 2000 was remixed and went viral on TikTok before before becoming a hit single.

Louis Theroux (born 1970) is a British-American documentary filmmaker, whose career has mostly been spent working for Creator/TheBBC, first coming to attention with the series ''Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends'', and continuing that with a series of one-off documentaries produced starting in the 2000s. Theroux's documentaries usually take place in America, and usually feature him getting up-close and personal with members of fringe communities, including prisoners, gamblers in Las Vegas, plastic surgery addicts, Neo-Nazis, and perhaps most famously, the Westboro Baptist Church. He very rarely makes actual judgements on those he is interviewing, but at the same time isn't afraid to ask probing questions.

* AngryBlackMan: He's made a documentary on black supremacists, varying from Nation of Islam off-shoots to black Jewish fundamentalists. Their whole rhetoric is scarily similar to the drivel that white supremacists in another documentary exhorted to Louis, demonizing the other side as AlwaysChaoticEvil subhumanoids, supporting racial segregation, and possibly a race war and/or genocide.

* ProfessionalGambler: In the Las Vegas episode, Louis hung around several people who gambled in the casinos for a living. The most succesful ones were given the VIP treatment for the publicity.

* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Joe Jackson stormed out of his interview with Louis, after the latter questioned whether Michael Jackson might be in the closet. Also counts as a RantInducingSlight, since Louis had previously asked him several far more probing questions about his violent behavior toward his children in their youth.

* ''Behind Bars'' -- The first of several documentaries about prisons, in this case San Quentin Prison in San Francisco

* ''The Ultra Zionists'' -- Another one that takes place outside America, this time in Israel, and featuring Jewish ultra-nationalists

* ''Drinking to Oblivion'' -- Taking place in his native UK for once, Louis documents severe alcohol addicts in London.

* {{Anticlimax}}: The opinion Louis has of a visit by Neo-Nazi leader Tom Metzger to Tijuana in ''Louis and the Nazis''. Prior to the visit (which he gets roped into being the driver for), Louis is worried about the possibility of some sort of ugly, racially-motivated incident taking place. In actuality, 99% of the visit involved Metzger and his agent going around bars, getting drunk and making jackasses of themselves, without doing much of anything out of the ordinary.[[invoked]]
* ArmorPiercingQuestion: The most cutting question in ''Savile'' is when one of Jimmy Savile's victims asks Louis "do you feel like you were groomed?", having watched his original documentary where Louis is clearly charmed and awed by Savile. Louis takes a while to make a reply, and says he feels uncomfortable using that word, as he was not physically abused like Savile's victims.

* CerebusSyndrome: Louis’ earlier documentaries such as Weird Weekends and When Louis Met generally have a much more quirky and lighthearted tone to them in comparison to much of his later work like Dark States, Altered States and Savile; likely as a result of Louis becoming more mature with age. The trend seems to have started with 2007’s The Most Hated Family In America, which in a way makes the Westboro Baptist Church a KnightOfCerebus.

** In the autism episode, one of the main teenagers he interviews brings up Louis's page at Wiki/{{Wikipedia}}, and jokingly reveals several aspects of Louis's past which he didn't exactly want to be made public knowledge (or at least, any more than they already were).

* EmasculatedCuckold: Louis brings this up while interviewing a female pornstar and her boyfriend. He asks her if she thinks it's hard on her boyfriend that she's being paid to have sex on camera with other men, even gangbangs. She counters that he doesn't have a job and often spends all day playing videogames, so he's not in a position to complain. They don't describe their own sex life in any detail, but her behavior suggests she's not very happy with her career and that her boyfriend is basically a LivingEmotionalCrutch.
* FreudianExcuseIsNoExcuse: In ''Shooting Joe Exotic'', Louis is allowed to investigate Joe Exotic's former personal belongings by Carole and Howard Baskin, and discovers a journal entry wherein Joe ruminates on his rough childhood and claims that his oldest brother had molested him. However, when Louis visits said brother and brings this up, he reveals that Joe made this up too, having made the exact same claim against two other people, including their father. While they did have to endure many harsh physical punishments, Joe was simply a manipulative, gaslighting narcissist driven primarily by greed.
* HitlerAteSugar: Discussed in ''Louis and the Nazis'', when Lamb & Lynx's mother is having them perform a dance around a swastika marked in tape on their kitchen floor. She argues that [[UsefulNotes/NonNaziSwastika the swastika is a good luck symbol and existed for thousands of years before Hitler was born]]. Louis says that while that's technically true, it's extremely naive of her to think that people won't be offended by it being used by a Neo-Nazi and self-proclaimed Aryan family.

* IHaveNoSon: A big part of ''America's Most Hated Family in Crisis'', with Steve Drain's daughter Lauren and Fred Phelps's granddaughter (and daughter of Fred Phelps Jr.) Libby having quit the church since the making of the original documentary. With the former the sentiment was very much shared, with her having become an agnostic and admitting she wants nothing more to do with her parents or the church. The latter on the other hand still deeply cares for her family, though admits the chances of ever getting back in the church, even if she wanted to do so, are virtually nil.

* TheLoinsSleepTonight: In ''Twilight of the Porn Stars'', Louis' intrusiveness during the filming of a porn scene actually causes the male performer to get spooked and needing cialis to finish the scene. As the cameraman explains to Louis, it's a common thing with new guys.

* MeaningfulBackgroundEvent: An unintended one happens near the end of ''The Most Hated Family in America'', when one of the younger members of the Phelps family drives Louis and the director/cameraman to a protest. As she pulls up, she admits she's genuinely baffled as to why people react so negatively to the family's protests... and as she speaks, other members of the church unload some signs containing particularly homophobic slogans from a truck in the background.

* MightMakesRight: In his prison documentaries, convicts are always very open that it's kill or be killed in a maximum security prison. Louis has trouble even getting one inmate to understand the weirdness (to an outsider) of immediately jumping on someone the moment they look at you funny. Another one expresses this sentiment with the word GABOS: Game Ain't Based On Sympathy.
* MoodWhiplash: Fred Phelps' sermon in ''The Most Hated Family in America'' starts out as a fairly standard-issue screed decrying same-sex marriage, but then goes off in some truly bizarre directions, culminating in Phelps' infamous proclamation that "You're gonna eat your babies!"

** Deconstructed in ''Twilight of the Porn Stars''. The nudity is very understated, and especially in the case of one webcam performer that Louie interviewed the documentary highlights the contrast between her "plain jane" downtime appearance and how long it takes for her to get dolled up to fulfill other people's fantasies.
* MyGreatestFailure: Judging by ''Savile'' and several other interviews at around the time of its first broadcast, it's pretty clear that Louis regards his failure to see Jimmy Savile for who he really was to be this. The fact that he met two of Savile's victims (albeit ones who described Jimmy in glowing terms as a boyfriend), and worked out that Savile started a relationship with one of them when they were 15 but dismissed that as a relic of that era, weighs particularly heavy on him.

* NoPronunciationGuide: American subjects of the documentaries often mispronounce Louis' name, not realising it is French. The most common pronunciation being saying his first name as 'Lou-is' instead of 'Lou-ie', and more hilariously, pronouncing "Theroux" as "Thee-rux" or "Theh-row" instead of "Ther-roo". Though off-camera, Louis tells them the correct way to say his name, their original attempts are often left in for RuleOfFunny.
* NotDistractedByTheSexy: In ''Twilight of the Porn Stars'', there are a lot of shots of camera and lighting crew in the middle of filming a porn scene just standing around looking bored or flipping through their smart phones. If you're around that stuff every working day of the week, it becomes tedious.

* SexEqualsLove: One of the questions that Louis asks in his porn documentaries is how the performers are able to separate the two given their chosen careers. As he eventually concludes, it's not as simple as it looks, with one middle-aged performer (Tommy Gunn) for example explaining to Louis that somewhere he yearns for a long-term relationship, and wonders if any of the multitude of girls he has sex with on a regular basis feel something for him emotionally.

* ThoseWackyNazis: The subject of ''Louis and the Nazis'', specifically Neo-Nazi groups in California. Obviously it's shown to be a fringe group with very few members outside of some mass gatherings. He also met a few [[SmallNameBigEgo 'celebrities']] within the white supremacy movement.
* UnproblematicProstitution: Zigzagged in Louis' documentary about a licensed brothel in Nevada. Some of the girls appear pretty happy to be working girls, some seem to be forced by circumstance more than anything. It really depends on the person and their own situation.

* HitlerAteSugar: Discussed in ''Louis and the Nazis'', when Lamb & Lynx's mother is having them perform a dance around a swastika marked in tape on their kitchen floor. She argues that [[NonNaziSwastika the swastika is a good luck symbol and existed for thousands of years before Hitler was born]]. Louis says that while that's technically true, it's extremely naive of her to think that people won't be offended by it being used by a Neo-Nazi and self-proclaimed Aryan family.

* ItRunsInTheFamily: Louis is the son of Paul Theroux, a travel writer known for his interest in strange cultures, ability to get on with anyone, and soft-spoken manner. The primary difference is that Paul is known and at times criticised for his strong opinions, whereas Louis tries to approach every situation in as balanced a way as possible.

* MixedAncestry: Louis's father Paul is American whereas his mother Anne is English, making him a citizen of both countries. This is why he's able to film in America on such a frequent basis. To complicate matters, he was actually born in Singapore (his parents were working there at the time).

* EmasculatedCuckold: Louis brings this while interviewing a female pornstar and her boyfriend. He asks her if she thinks it's hard on her boyfriend that she's being paid to have sex on camera with other men, even gangbangs. She counters that he doesn't have a job and often spends all day playing videogames, so he's not in a position to complain. They don't describe their own sex life in any detail, but her behavior suggests she's not very happy with her career and that her boyfriend is basically a LivingEmotionalCrutch.

* EmasculatedCuckold: Louis brings this while interviewing a female pornstar and her boyfriend. He asks her if she thinks it's hard on her boyfriend that she's being paid to have sex on camera with other men, even orgies. She counters that he doesn't have a job and sometimes spends all day playing videogames, so he's not in a position to complain. They don't describe their own sex life in any detail, but her behavior suggests she's not very happy with her career and that her boyfriend is basically a LivingEmotionalCrutch.

* NotSoDifferent: In ''The Most Hated Family in America'' and its sequel, Louis notes that he actually has a lot in common with Steve Drain, the Westboro Baptist Church's in-house filmmaker[[note]](and, following the excommunication and death of Fred Phelps, currently its de-facto leader)[[/note]]. On top of that, he notes that the vast majority of the church members actually seem very normal when not involved in protests.

* SituationalSexuality: Louis Theroux encountered this when he interviewed several {{transgender}} inmates in his prison documentary "Behind Bars". They have to constantly be careful that another prisoner doesn't kidnap them and keep them in their own cell for some length of time. They're just that starved of having a female presence at "home". He also came across a few male couples, including one man who was straight on the outside.

* ActivistFundamentalistAntics: Louis has twice made a documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church, and has accompanied them on their rallies and funeral picketing as a quiet observer. However, he was slightly amused (not to mention bemused) when they basically declared him, personally, to be one of the chief enemies of the chosen people.

* FreudianExcuseIsNoExcuse: In ''Shooting Joe Exotic'', Louis is allowed to investigate Joe Exotic's former personal belongings by Carole and Howard Baskin, and discovers a journal entry wherein Joe ruminates on his rough childhood and even claims that his oldest brother had molested him. However, when Louis visits said brother and brings this up, he reveals that Joe made this up too, having made the exact same claim against two other people, including their father. While they did have to endure many harsh physical punishments, Joe was simply a manipulative, gaslighting narcissist driven primarily by greed.

** On his return visit to the Westboro Baptist Church, Louis finds out that not only have they made a "Louis Theroux in Hell" sign for their protests, Fred Phelps has even called him "one of the biggest workers of inequity in the history of mankind" and even likened him to Pontius Pilate, both of which Louis admits being weirdly proud of.

* MightMakesRight: In his prison documentaries, convicts are always very open that it's literally kill or be killed in a maximum security prison. Louis has trouble even getting one inmate to understand the weirdness (to an outsider) of immediately jumping on someone the moment they look at you funny. Another one expresses this sentiment with the word GABOS: Game Ain't Based On Sympathy.

* NotDistractedByTheSexy: In ''Twilight of the Porn Stars'', there are a lot of shots of camera and lighting crew in the middle of filming a porn scene just standing around looking bored or flipping through their smart phones. If you're around that stuff every working day of the week, of course it becomes tedious.

* HitlerAteSugar: Discussed in ''Louis and the Nazis'', when Lamb & Lynx's mother is having them perform a dance around a swastika marked in tape on their kitchen floor. She argues that the swastika is a good luck symbol and existed for thousands of years before Hitler was born. Louis says that while that's technically true, it's extremely naive of her to think that people won't be offended by it being used by a Neo-Nazi and self-proclaimed Aryan family.