Louis Theroux

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About

Louis Theroux is a British documentary filmmaker and journalist. He's known for documentaries on controversial groups, such as the Westboro Baptist Church and Scientology, which are defined by his unassuming personality and dry comedy.

History

In 1994, after writing for Spy magazine, Louis Theroux was hired as a correspondent for Michael Moror's teleivison series TV Nation, a comedic news magazine show (shown below). Theroux said of the experience, "I wanted to be this smooth network correspondent, but I couldn't pull that off. He must have got that it would be quite funny to take this slightly geeky British twentysomething and put him out of his depth in the American heartland."^[1]

In 1998, Theroux's television series, _ Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends_, premiered. The series ran for three seasons, and featured such topics as U.F.Os, born-again christians, black nationalism and more.^[2] Following Weird Weekends, Theroux hosted When Louis Meets…, an interview series, which aired from 2000 to 2002.

In 2003, BBC Two premiered the first of more than 30 documentary specials. On April 3rd, 2011, the channel aired America's Most Hated Family, a documentary about the West Boro Baptist Church (clip below, left). The documentary received more than 3.3 million viewers upon its premiered.

On October 14th, 2015, Theroux's feature length documentary, My Scientology Movie, premiered in the U.K (shown below, right).

Fandom

Louis Theroux joined Twitter ^[3] on September 22nd, 2009. The account has more than 1.9 million followers as October 2018.

Three years later, in September 2012, Theroux launched a Facebook. ^[4] The account has more than 700,000 likes and follows.

Meme Accounts

Images from Theroux's various documentaries have been the inspiraction of various Theroux-based meme accounts, including @NoContextLouis,^[5] @louistherouxbot,^[6] which randomly generates Louis Theroux documentaries, and Louis Theroux Reactions,^[7] a series of reaction images taken from his movies (examples below).

Of the series of meme accounts, Theroux said,^[8] "You mean I'm a tiny little phenomenon in a tiny country, is that what you're saying? It's an in-joke, I hadn't thought about that… so I'm actually a meme because I'm so irrelevant…I'd like to imagine that they recognise that the me that they see onscreen is to some extent a construction. That it's a curated version of who I am, created by myself, my editor, my director."