Louis Theroux - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Theroux is the youngest son of the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux (who is of French-Canadian and Italian descent). His (British) mother, Anne Castle, was his father's first wife. His elder brother is the writer and television presenter Marcel Theroux. He is the cousin of American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux. Born in Singapore, he moved to the UK when he was one, and was brought up in London thereafter.

Theroux was educated for a couple of years at Allfarthing Primary School then moved to Westminster School (where he was a friend and contemporary of the comedians Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish). Another of his contemporaries was Liberal Democrat politician, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg with whom he travelled to America. He then went to Magdalen College, Oxford where he gained a first class degree in history and was noted for his film reviews for the Grapevine magazine.

His first employment as a journalist was with Metro Silicon Valley, an alternative free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. In 1992 he was hired as a writer for Spy magazine. He was also working as a correspondent on Michael Moore's TV Nation series, for which he provided segments on off-beat cultural subjects, including Avon ladies in the Amazon, the Jerusalem syndrome, and the attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people. When TV Nation ended he was signed to a development deal by the BBC, out of which came Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. He has guest-written for a number of publications including Hip-Hop Connection and he continues to write for The Idler.