Louis Theroux turns up for our interview looking more hairy than usual. “You’ve caught me with an unauthorised beard,” he says sheepishly. He was meant to shave it off ahead of filming a new documentary, but couldn’t find his trimmer, necessitating a hasty shopping trip to buy a replacement.
It makes for a strange sight, given how used we are to Theroux quizzically stroking his hairless chin in the middle of one of his unfailingly polite interrogations. He’s been doing it for 25 years now, starting in 1994 on Michael Moore’s polemical magazine show TV Nation. “I couldn’t actually grow a beard at that time,” he says. “I could manage a few wispy hairs. I supposed I should just be clean-shaven – it would be good for continuity. But in my private life, I have a beard.”
It’s tempting to conclude, given his reputation as a master interviewer, that his beardlessness might be some strategy, a clever gambit designed to disarm his subjects. Are there perhaps two Therouxs? The bearded private figure away from the camera, and the clean-shaven character he plays on screen? Theroux won’t go that far. “But it does put me in work mode if I shave,” he says. “It feels slightly ceremonial. I’m trying not to say it’s like when jihadists trim their hair before they go on a mission. I’m trying not to say that.”
He delivers that last line with the same gentle, winking provocation that characterised many of his early documentaries, gonzo efforts that saw Theroux embed himself with the worst of society – KKK members, funeral-picketing haters of homosexuality and, notoriously, Jimmy Savile. In the last decade, though, Theroux’s output has undergone a shift. The curious, ingenuous tone remains but the subject matter is more grave and grounded: alcoholism, brain injury and anorexia have all been explored (though there has been the odd lurch back: a recent film on polyamory saw him, shirtless, attending an “erotic eating event”).
Theroux’s latest film, Mothers on the Edge, tackles postpartum psychosis, where mothers have severe psychiatric problems in the days, weeks and even months after giving birth. The full extent of the condition, which occurs in approximately one in 1,000 women with no prior history of mental health issues (for those with a history, the figure is much higher), is not commonly known, even though it can cause depression, delusions, mania, and the need for hospitalisation. Theroux was one of those who were in the dark until a colleague shared an article about it. He was struck by how it resembled “that strange mixture of elation and desperation” that comes with being a new parent.
“I like to pick themes that are extreme versions of things we all struggle with,” he says. “We have this rose-tinted view of what motherhood should be like. Yet if we’re honest, especially those of us who have had children, we know it isn’t that simple. It’s the nature of parenthood to feel, some of the time, that you might be one of the worst parents who ever lived. It’s very rarely an uncomplicated rush of positive emotions.”
In the film, Theroux visits two specialist units: one at Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, the other in Melbury Lodge, Winchester. He focuses on three patients: first-time mother Catherine; Lisa, who had a psychotic episode after the birth of her third child; and Barbara, who has been having hallucinations post-birth. The units allow the mothers to live alongside their babies while receiving treatment. Others have not been so fortunate: there were reports last year of cases of mothers being separated from their newborns.
All three speak candidly and affectingly about the toll postpartum psychosis has taken on them. At times, it’s shocking to witness the disassociation they feel from their own children. Early on, we see a mother struggling to stroke her own son’s foot.
“With the mums I met,” says Theroux, “it wasn’t so much that feelings of love were absent, but that they were drowned out by other emotions: anxiety, confusion, depression. It’s like the noise of a leafblower outside drowning out the classical music that you’re listening to. You need to treat these other unhealthy emotions, this emotional background noise.”
For these women, that “background noise” sits alongside the wider societal and psychological pressures felt by every new parent. “The people I was meeting had gone into the decision of having a child with every expectation of being picture-perfect parents,” Theroux notes. “It resonates with a feeling I’ve had as I’ve seen my peers having children – that sometimes it’s the last people you expect who have major stumbles.”
In the case of the mums encountered by Theroux, “they were being brilliant parents but somehow couldn’t quite see it. They were being super attentive and doing everything that needed to be done and yet – either thought active psychosis, or through profound feelings of depression and anxiety – their confidence was completely eaten away.”
This, as you might have guessed, is heavy, hard-to-watch TV, full of despair and difficult truths – a world away from the larks of his Weird Weekends. Theroux himself is conscious “of the need not to have to trespass too much on the viewer’s goodwill. I want the programmes to be enlightening, informative but for them not to feel like hard work.” To that end, he says, the presence of the babies was helpful. “You’ve got these babies who obviously don’t have mental health issues sort of popping up throughout the story, bringing a sense of lightness and joy into the mix. And poo.”
Yes, poo. The film is overflowing with the stuff. Theroux, keen to build a rapport with the mums, throws himself into it. “I’m not too horrified by babies’ poo,” he says. “I have three boys and the youngest is four. So it didn’t feel like a million years ago that I was changing nappies.” There’s something rather charming about seeing Theroux approaching these parental duties in that familiar gawky manner, although he did have to rein himself in.
“I started worrying that by showing off what a good dad I was, I’d be somehow impeding the mums from learning. Like some three-dimensional version of mansplaining: ‘Here’s how you do it. It’s easy, what’s wrong with you that you can’t do it?’”
Theroux’s more serious work has presented new moral quandaries. It’s one thing to be following, say, Keith Harris and Orville around, as Theroux did in 2002, quite another to be profiling vulnerable individuals such as Catherine, Lisa and Barbara. He says his team constantly check that subjects are comfortable with their stories being told on screen and, even after broadcast, they keep in touch with contributors, as Theroux calls them.
Still, there are times when things come to a head. “We made a film a few years ago about alcohol dependency,” he says. “We had a contributor who more or less became homeless while we were filming because his drinking had got so bad. It puts you in an odd position as a programme-maker.”
Then there was The Night in Question, his documentary about sexual assault on US college campuses, which aired in March. Theroux quizzed student Saifullah Khan, who was accused of sexual assault while at Yale. Khan maintained his innocence and was later acquitted of the charge in a Connecticut court, but was subsequently expelled by Yale following an internal investigation.
The film was something of a rarity for the documentarian, in that it wasn’t met with universal praise. Chief among the complaints was that it provided a platform to an alleged abuser, without the alleged victim being heard from (the woman declined to take part and has chosen to remain anonymous). In the event, a conflicting account from a former friend midway through the film calls into question the wider character of Khan, though Khan is afforded ample space to give his side of the story.
Theroux insists he is pleased with how the film turned out, and notes that he sought to provide balance by reading aloud transcripts of the alleged victim’s testimony and featuring other victims’ separate accounts of sexual assault. Ultimately, though, he says a backlash was inevitable given the “difficult terrain” of the subject matter. “It’s a high-stakes endeavour and there are situations where it’s extremely hard to figure out what happened. You’ve got two countervailing impulses, both extremely important: one of them is due process and the other is the recognition of the seriousness of rape and sexual assault.”
Rather than run away from this difficult terrain, Theroux prefers to throw himself headlong into it. “In terms of having a focus,” he says, “I like to take those rubbing spots where it’s really hard to see what the right thing is.”
It is, after all, what he’s been doing for 25 years, beard or no beard.
• Mothers on the Edge is on BBC Two on 12 May.
