It’s been over 30 years since Louis Theroux was first given an opportunity to make documentaries as a reporter on Michael Moore’s TV Nation.
Since then Theroux has become the preeminent documenter of the weird, the extreme, and the dangerous, filming everyone from members of the Westboro Baptist Church to ultra-Zionists in the West Bank.
But in Inside the Manosphere, his first film with Netflix, out March 11, Theroux is tackling what he only somewhat jokingly describes to WIRED as “the final boss battle in the gamified career of Louis Theroux.”
“I’ve been circling this subject” for years, Theroux tells WIRED from the Squid Game meeting room in Netflix’s London headquarters. “It combines cultlike groupings, misogyny, adult content, creation of pornographic content, and obviously racism. All these taboo areas of life that I’ve spent my TV work documenting in different forms come together in the manosphere.”
Theroux says he was drawn to the subject not just because of how pervasive and influential it is, but also the challenge of filming subjects who are in turn filming you and turning your presence into content that boosts their channels.
The manosphere is a broad description for a category of online figures that incorporates everyone from über-podcaster Joe Rogan to health and fitness content creators and crypto bros. For his documentary, Theroux focused on the extreme edges of the manosphere that push racist and misogynistic content to lure in young viewers.
“The aim isn’t just to push toxic content,” says Theroux. “That, in a sense, is the entryway, that’s the front door through which they get people’s attention. But the aim is to engage young boys, especially, and get them to buy their products, their slightly crappy FX trading products or their so-called online universities. It’s a rather cynical grift.”
He has in the past touched the manosphere world, filming with convicted January 6 insurrectionist Anthime Gionet (aka Baked Alaska) and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
“We went into this as an opportunity to explore a world that’s increasingly influential” says Theroux. “This has scale and reach beyond anything I’ve looked at of comparable extremeness … There are tens of millions of people who are watching this content. It’s an important subject.”
To make his point, Theroux spent time with HSTikkyTokky, a British influencer whose real name is Harrison Sullivan, and American manosphere superstar Sneako (real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy), who attended President Donald Trump’s most recent inauguration. He also spends time with Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl), a prominent host of the Fresh and Fit podcast, and Justin Waller, a Miami-based influencer.
But there was one manosphere character Theroux was unable to convince to take part: Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer who has been charged with rape in multiple countries. (He has also been charged with human trafficking in the UK; he has denied all allegations.)
Tate, along with his brother Tristan, has become among the most recognizable faces of the manosphere movement, earning huge sums of money from tens of millions of followers.
When Theroux messaged Tate about the possibility of spending some time with him, he says Tate responded: “I’m the most relevant man on the planet. And who are you? You were relevant years ago?”
Tate then followed up with a screenshot of Google Trends that showed a blue line at the top of the graph indicating search interest in Tate over time and a red line along the bottom of the graph showing interest in Theroux over the same period, according to Theroux.
