Louis Theroux names the worst person he’s ever met after 30 years of documentaries – The Hook news

Louis Theroux has said the worst person he ever met during more than three decades of documentary-making was Jimmy Savile, revisiting one of the most unsettling episodes of his career at a moment when his latest film, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, has returned him to the centre of debate about how journalists confront dangerous men and extremist ideas. In a recent LADbible “Honesty Box” interview, Theroux was asked who the worst person he had met was and replied that his mind “tends to go to Jimmy Savile”, adding that when he met the former television presenter he did not yet know the full truth about the crimes that would later emerge.

Theroux said the answer was shaped not only by what Savile later turned out to be, but by the unsettling fact that he had spent time with him face to face while making a documentary in 2000. He described “that strange dissonance of later finding out that he’d done these dreadful things”, and said Savile had since become “probably the worst kind of VIP predator or person in the public eye who was a predator, certainly of recent times”. The remarks were brief, but they carried unusual weight because Savile occupies a singular place in Theroux’s body of work, as both a subject he interviewed before the full scale of abuse became public and a figure he later revisited in a separate film.

The comments have surfaced just as Theroux is promoting Inside the Manosphere, his new Netflix documentary examining online influencers and personalities who push a hyper-masculine, misogynistic worldview to large digital audiences. Netflix says the film gives Theroux rare access to a growing ultra-masculine network and its controversial influencers, while Theroux himself has described the subject as one that draws together themes he has explored for years, including pornography, the far right, conspiracy culture and exploitative media performance. In an interview with The Guardian, he said there was “so much Savile overlap” in the way some men he now films talk about women, power and public notoriety.

That comparison helps explain why Savile still looms so heavily over Theroux’s work. When Louis Met… Jimmy was first broadcast in 2000, Savile was still a famous broadcaster and fundraiser, long surrounded by rumours but never publicly exposed on the scale that followed after his death in 2011. Theroux later returned to the subject in the 2016 documentary Louis Theroux: Savile, reflecting on his original interviews and on the extent to which Savile manipulated those around him. LADbible’s account of Theroux’s latest remarks notes that he spent time with Savile in Leeds, Scarborough and Glencoe while filming the earlier programme, pressing him even then about rumours of paedophilia that Savile denied.

The historical record that emerged after Savile’s death helps explain why Theroux’s answer remains so stark. The joint Metropolitan Police and NSPCC report Giving Victims a Voice concluded that around 450 people had come forward with allegations relating to Savile, with 214 alleged criminal offences formally recorded across 28 police forces. The report described him as one of Britain’s most prolific known sexual predators, with alleged victims ranging from children to adults and offences said to have taken place over decades in hospitals, schools, BBC premises and other institutions. Those findings transformed public understanding not just of Savile, but of the systems that failed to stop him.

For Theroux, the Savile case has long been tied to questions of proximity, performance and journalistic responsibility. In The Guardian interview published this month, he referred again to Savile while discussing the men featured in Inside the Manosphere, suggesting that some of the contemptuous attitudes to women expressed by present-day influencers echoed things Savile used to say. The point was not that the men were identical, but that Theroux sees recurring patterns in how charismatic male figures package misogyny, denial and self-mythology. That helps place his latest admission in a broader context. When he names Savile as the worst person he met, he is speaking not just about criminal depravity but about a style of manipulation he believes can survive in very different forms across generations.

Theroux’s wider career makes that answer all the more telling. Over roughly 30 years he has embedded himself among neo-Nazis, cult members, prison inmates, sex offenders, far-right activists and fringe celebrities, building a reputation for calm, awkward persistence in the presence of people many viewers find repellent or dangerous. In the same recent profile, The Guardian described him as the grandmaster of immersive documentary, someone whose work has ranged from American subcultures in the 1990s to Scientology, opioid addiction, prisons and extremist politics. By his own account, he has met many people who could plausibly qualify as the worst, including violent offenders and predatory figures, yet he still singled out Savile.

There is also a personal dimension to why the Savile encounter appears to have stayed with him. Theroux has spoken before about the discomfort of realising, in hindsight, that troubling signs were present in the original footage even if the full picture was not then visible. The Savile films remain among the most discussed works in his catalogue because they capture that uneasy before-and-after effect: first a broadcaster interviewing an eccentric celebrity, then years later a documentarian re-examining his own material after revelations that changed everything. His latest comments preserve that sense of retrospective shock. He was not saying Savile seemed obviously the worst man in the room at the time. He was saying the later discovery of who Savile really was makes that encounter feel unmatched in horror.

That tension between what is visible and what remains concealed has become central to Theroux’s recent work. Inside the Manosphere examines men who are far more explicit than Savile ever was in broadcasting their views, but Theroux’s concern appears similar: how dangerous ideas are normalised through charisma, media attention and audiences willing to indulge or excuse them. Netflix says the new film investigates the growing cultural influence of extremist influencers on young boys, while The Guardian interview suggests Theroux sees these figures as part of a larger continuum of male power, grievance and performance. In that sense, his remarks about Savile are not a detour from the new documentary but part of the same story.

For viewers who have followed Theroux’s career, the significance of the answer lies in its bluntness. He did not reach for a recent extremist or an online provocateur, despite spending the past year immersed in that world. He named a dead broadcaster whose crimes were uncovered only after decades of institutional failure and public adoration. In doing so, Theroux appeared to underline a lesson that has run through much of his work: the most disturbing people are not always the loudest or most obviously monstrous in the moment, and the true scale of harm can remain hidden until long after the cameras stop rolling.