Embarrassing more so than threatening for the documentarian.
Louis Theroux is such a loveable character that when we heard he was doing a live Twitter Q&A, we were absolutely delighted because we knew he would reveal answers that we didn’t even know we wanted to hear.
The Q&A coincided with the last episode of his Dark States documentaries, but fear not Therouxians, he will have a one-off documentary on BBC next week which is not to be missed.
So, what did we learn about Theroux during his talks on Twitter? He was an assistant to a glass blower for a while before he fully got on board with the whole journalism career.
If he could interview anyone or any group from any time period, he would have loved to have gotten real access to Michael Jackson while he was alive and properly finish off the documentary that he started about the pop king.
When asked what superpower he wished he had, it was obvious that Theroux had thought of an answer before:
“If someone bumps into you not if you bump into them but if they bump into you aggressively, you could give them an electric shock or that your skin would turn into acid and burn them, not badly but just a little bit. Maybe that’s a bit psycho… that made me sound like a psychopath.”
But it was a man called Liam Brusby that had the toughest question of the night for Theroux: “What’s the worst situation you’ve been in when creating your documentaries?”
@LiamBrusby Tough question, Liam. Here's your response from @louistheroux 👍 #AskTheroux pic.twitter.com/1tb2mJwgl0
— BBC Two (@BBCTwo) October 22, 2017
Theroux replied:
“I’ve been in, not a lot but a handful of situations that felt a little bit dangerous. There was a riot in Lagos [and] an act of civil disobedience in the west bank in Israel where rubber bullets for firing. I was at a neo-Nazi rally where they took against us and that felt tense. In a physical sense, a primal fear, I was talking to a skin-head and he seemed to think I was Jewish, he was drunk. The one that haunts me the most, I was conscious at the time of it feeling dreadful. It wasn’t psychical fear but with a profound sense of embarrassment – was auditioning for a Norwegian cruise line and that weird feeling that it was going drastically and horrendously wrong. [It was] in an episode of the Weird Weekend series’ about Off-Broadway performers.”
