Louis Theroux says he would be the 'world's worst politician' as he talks being on set in Altered States

Back on the box: Louis Theroux's Altered States starts this weekend
JACK TAYLOR/AFP/Getty Images

Louis Theroux’s career has reached a watershed. Specifically, the 9pm Sunday night watershed.

“My first thought was, have they set me up?” says Theroux, finding himself at a “massage à trois” party while investigating polyamory in Portland, Oregon. “I still haven’t looked back at the full unexpurgated glory of it but, that being said, this is the work I do.”

And, admittedly, “There were things I liked about it. I’ve been in a committed relationship for 16 years, and, not to say I plan to make a habit of it, but having a man or woman just massaging my shoulders, nibbling my arm and squashing a strawberry into my mouth was a nice change from the norm.”

Taker: Louis Theroux experienced both sides of the sensual eating party
BBC

The series is as bold as you’d expect from Theroux: three hour-long US specials on assisted dying, polyamory, and open adoption, all meditating on the tragi-comic “pinch points” of human existence.

We meet Jerry, the spurned third wheel squeezed out of his poly relationship with Heide (his wife) and Joe; Debra, vivacious but lonely enough that she’s choosing to die; Patricia, a troubled birth mother being paid to give up her baby, but having second thoughts.

“They’re not supposed to be purgatorial to watch,” says Theroux. “I don’t want to make the kind of programme where you feel, having watched it, that you need to go and watch three episodes of X Factor to feel better again. That would be awful.”

In fact, he doesn’t like to be seen as a moral arbiter. “I think I’d be the worst politician in the world. The only time I find myself out of my depth is when I’m asked to take a position on a grand social issue. I’d be happy to be a friendly ear: I’d be a good agony uncle if I didn’t have to reply. Just read the letters and say, ‘I can see where you’re coming from. That does sound hard...’”

Theroux and his family have just moved back to northwest London after a year living in the US to film Altered States.

Getting involved: Louis Theroux is fed by a member of the Sex Positive Portland group
BBC

Admittedly, he’s a biased “BBC animal”, but he says he missed the corporation. “There’s something quite reassuring about having it. It’s like the NHS. You don’t have to work too hard to find something decent, or something your kids can watch that doesn’t have adverts for dildos in the middle of it.”

Having made documentaries in and about America since Bill Clinton’s term, he says the US is a more “vulnerable” nation than he’s ever known it. “But I can’t lay it all at the door of Trump. I think that for good or ill, a certain level of anxiety, anguish and stress is built into the existential package of being human. We could have the perfect president and he or she wouldn’t eradicate death or jealousy. These are evergreen issues.”

He’s been interested in Rosanne Barr’s fall from grace, and has mooted a documentary on the subject. “I’m more interested in failure than success,” he says. “There was a sports journalist who said the best lesson is to leave the cheering crowds around the winner and head straight for the loser’s locker. To my mind, there’s more emotional weight and interest to understanding those people dealing with something difficult than those coming off a triumph.”

Documentarian: Louis Theroux
Getty Images

Theroux says his own “fear and anxiety are about a loss of control”. When filming the series Dark States two years ago, they visited a trap house in Huntington, West Virginia, to get a release signed that would allow them to use a filmed scene of an opiate’s overdose.

“The guy said he didn’t want us there and it was all quite ugly and dicey. I remember feeling quite afraid. And then he offered me a puff on his joint, and I thought, I guess this is a test, and if I don’t smoke it he’ll think I’m the police. And then I did it. And then I became immensely high and suddenly everything became a hundred times worse because, in addition to the insecurity and danger, I wasn’t in my right mind for the rest of the day. I don’t think it even made a difference except he said, ‘Now I KNOW you ain’t in the police’.”

Now he wants to focus on the UK. “It’s a different kind of weird to the US,” he says. “But what is weird? Isn’t life quite weird? Isn’t the idea of living for 70 to 80 years and then dying, weird? Actually, aren’t emotions weird? Immanuel Kant referred to the crooked timber of humanity out of which nothing straight can be built.” Crooked timber? “It’s just another way of saying weird.”

Louis Theroux’s Altered States: Love Without Limits airs at 9pm on BBC Two on Sunday.

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