“I’ve made documentaries for over 30 years now, and in a way, this subject feels like the final boss,” says Louis Theroux over a cup of lemon and ginger tea in Netflix’s central London office. “Racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, porn, human trafficking – all of it is folded in.”
He’s talking about a grim coalition of supercar-worshipping, antifeminist influencers who have emerged as a mainstream political and cultural force in recent years, stalking the feeds of teenage boys around the world – including Theroux’s own sons. It was hearing them discuss Andrew Tate in 2022 that convinced him the dark end of the manosphere should be the focus of a new film out this month, his first since moving to Netflix from his usual home of the BBC.
From following a notorious ragebaiting British TikToker around Marbella to travelling deep into the podcast studios – and homes – of sinister American influencers like Sneako, Justin Waller and Myron Gaines, Inside the Manosphere is a horrifying glimpse of a toxic culture mixed, as ever, with moments of surprising vulnerability. “I do think you’ve got to embrace all the dimensions of [this world] and accept there’s parts of it that are humorous, intriguing, funny, charismatic,” says Theroux. “And then there’s parts of it that are horrific, painful, and, I think, dangerous.” Shortly after filming wrapped, we sat down to discuss the film’s characters, his explanation for their rise, and the fallout he’s expecting when the film airs.
GQ: You’ve interviewed murderers and neo-Nazis in your career. Still, did anything you discovered making this film shock you?
LT: I mean, how long have you got? [The manosphere] runs on an engine of misogyny, fundamentally, and it’s become quite normal in those circles to say that women shouldn’t vote. That feels shocking to me. Also when you hear them say that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to mix with straight people. A lot of the antisemitic stuff feels shocking because the taboo around that is so strong. And at the same time, you see this stuff on X, right? So in a strange way, you’re encountering X in the real world.
In your work, it often feels like you swim in niche waters to illuminate bigger truths. But the manosphere is different. It’s not contained; it’s everywhere. Is that another reason it feels like a “final boss”?
10,000 per cent. And I’ve had the dark privilege of noticing how stories that I did in the ’90s, about conspiracy theories, and UFOs, and the porn industry, are now what’s driving the internet and the culture. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that a lot of this is down to the influence of social media and the way in which it has given vent to the darkest parts of the human soul. Not just given vent to them, but actively amplified them and pushed them into our feeds. So yeah, this is not a niche subject.
You spend time with a 24-year-old British streamer called HSTikkyTokky. There’s a funny moment when he starts talking directly to your camera, and you have to tell him to pretend it’s not there and talk to you instead.
Yeah, it felt like an illustration of some seismic shift in media culture. He doesn’t even know, really, what a documentary is. For him, the idea that you would ignore the camera feels weird. Maybe it is quite weird.
There’s a moment where you ask him outright: why don’t you use this influence you have over young men in a positive way? Did you ask that because you saw some good in him?
It’s complicated. I do think there’s clearly positive qualities there. I’m going to sound like a complete – well, the internet term is “simp”, isn’t it – and point out that everyone’s a mixture of good and bad. Even [Andrew] Tate – we know he’s got qualities of charisma. He’s a talented broadcaster, which counts for something, but he’s using those talents to put out a message that I think is retrograde and misogynistic. With HS, I would go back and forth between seeing him as in some ways likeable and capable of being considerate. And then at other times, there’s a callous side there, a flintiness. He says towards the end, “I’m approaching the game of life and I’m doing very well. I make a lot of money.” Why wouldn’t he [for example] interview [adult content creator] Bonnie Blue and then just abuse her for half an hour?
His answer is kind of hard to refute: “If I was nice I wouldn’t blow up on the internet.”
Well, that’s the other thing. Being a dick is enormously profitable on the internet.
You say you had to jump through a lot of hoops to get access to these guys, particularly the bigger American figures like Sneako. Why do you think they agreed to it?
First of all, they’ve got less to lose by appearing in a documentary than someone whose livelihood depends on paycheques from legacy media. Secondly, it’s Netflix, which has genuine cachet for them. If I’d rocked up and said, “I’m from the BBC,” I think it would’ve been different. And it’s not like there’s anything they’re going to say to me that they haven’t said to all their followers online already.
And yet you did get something they haven’t shown their followers, by insisting you interview them alongside their partners. Like Myron Gaines, the Fresh & Fit podcaster. You quote him in front of his partner saying he wants multiple wives and he looks embarrassed and backpedals.
With a lot of these guys, you feel like they’re almost role-playing as alphas – as silverbacks with harems of subordinate females. That’s the dream. But the reality, as far as I could tell, was that Myron was in a monogamous relationship that was quite sweet and respectful. After she’s like, “Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’m not too sure about other wives,” he felt humiliated, I think. So then he’s like, “Go and clean the room” – a bit of performative chauvinism. [Contacting subjects through their partners] is how I have done it, going back years and years. In your intimate relationships, it’s hard to keep the façade up.
Do you think any of them are going to be embarrassed in any way when this comes out?
I think Myron might feel a bit embarrassed, and that doesn’t give me any pleasure. It doesn’t give me massive displeasure, either. Myron is probably the most extreme of all the people in the programme. He’s fully committed to an outlook that’s almost breathtakingly antisemitic and racist, which is weird, given that he’s, I think, of Sudanese heritage.
Another influencer you interview, Justin Waller, says people don’t believe him when he says he is happy. Do you think these guys are happy doing this stuff?
I don’t know if their happiness or non-happiness is a massively helpful metric. I think they’re people who are managing to make a kind of success for themselves in this bizarre media wilderness that we now inhabit. Take Myron: he seems to be a workaholic. He’s all-in on this project of creating the hub for his extreme manosphere content. I think his life is rather ascetic; he just gets up and streams for 10 hours. They’re grinding in an almost obsessive way. I think they’ve become captives of a kind of a content creation treadmill they can’t get off. To me it feels like there’s a culture of rather traumatised people who’ve come out of households in which things weren’t always OK and had to learn these strategies of survival, and then packaged them. I think the ideology is a compensation for the weakness they felt as children. I also think, like other forms of celebrity I’ve covered, what starts as an expression of something true for you – working through demons or attempting to process trauma – becomes monetised, and then you end up imprisoned in the caricature. I think it was [author John] Updike who said, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” And that was in an era of being in a movie or something. If you’re literally pursuing fame and enacting it in a 24/7 feedback loop then, existentially, I think that’s quite a difficult thing to be in.
When you zoom out and look at the manosphere as a whole, who or what do you hold most responsible?
I think you have to hold the influencers responsible, which is what we do in the film. But I think what you are talking about is something that’s slightly outside the remit of the film, which is both the media barons who are profiting from cynically deploying algorithms and platforms and technology in a way that kind of makes us the worst versions of ourselves. And to an extent, I suppose, a political and cultural establishment. The thing is, we’re all kind of complicit in this to different degrees. No one’s got clean hands. And it would be nice if there were a handful of people who we could say are the problem, but that’s a conspiratorial framing for what we’re living through, which is that we’re kind of colluding in our own moronification. Helplessly drawn in, aware at the same time, as we are endlessly lashed to the screens of our phones as Odysseus was to his mast.
You spend some time with two young fans of Tate in the film. What did you learn from them?
You realise there is a hunger for something. There’ve always been people who feel left behind by life. We’re all pressing our noses up against the shop window of Instagram and TikTok, seeing things we feel should be ours, and that can be hugely demoralising. One of those guys had a brother who had killed himself. He’d been living in his car and he was just lost. I got the impression there hadn’t been a dad in the picture. It reminds me a tiny bit of Scientology, which I also made a film about. It’s this idea that people need answers. And I often felt with Scientology, it was people who hadn’t been especially well-educated, so they felt like, “Oh, I’m getting an education. I’m understanding how the cosmos works and human psychology.” And there’s these big books that are deliberately designed to look like ancient tomes of knowledge with leather bindings and gold leaf. And if you go into a Scientology building, it’s all globes and dark wooden furniture…
… the muscles and the Lamborghinis.
Yeah, like, “I need something to feel less empty, to feel like I’m competing in the game of life.” I think the other part of it is how persuasive conspiratorial stories are. There’s this whole thing [among manosphere influencers] with their special hand gestures about the Illuminati who are “controlling everything”. This idea there’s a room full of shadowy guys who are planning everything and basically plotting our enslavement.
Do you have sympathy with the idea that boys are being let down or left behind in some ways today?
As a father of three boys, I’m conscious of boys feeling that they’ve got a place at the table, while recognising that historically it’s been the case that women have been underrepresented or discriminated against. I think it’s a fine line and it’s easy for these things to be misconstrued, but I do think people should be sensitive about the message that boys are getting. I think that “puppy-dogs’ tails” mentality has crept into some areas of life. You’ve got to separate masculinity from toxic masculinity.
Has making this film made you feel better equipped as a father?
First of all, if you’re a dad and you’re [in the home], I think you’re already ahead of the game. Not to say you can’t still be a great dad if you’re not living in the house or if there’s been a divorce or a separation or whatever, but I don’t think there’s any substitute for being in the lives of the people. But I’m aware that I’m having to compete with these versions of masculinity that exist on the internet from guys who are there with their harems of women and their big, muscly bodies. And if you’re 15, 16, and you’ve got a grey dad who’s kind of stumbling around the house in a dressing gown, versus an alpha-male influencer with his big muscles, then you can see why you’re slightly behind the curve in a sense. So you’ve just got to be hands-on. I suffer from being overly agreeable; I’m conflict averse. So one of my internal things is how much to model a sort of masculinity that’s more imposing, more assertive.
There appears to be a trend for influencers in this space going down a religious path. Your film ends with Sneako doing that. Why do you think this is happening?
I don’t know. It’s very hard to call. This is probably going to get me into hot water, but I think that if you’re so deep into a conspiracy theory that believes a handful of people are controlling the fate of civilisations, well, what’s further along from that is the idea of a supernatural entity controlling everything that happens. I also think it’s possible the existential burnout becomes so severe that you need something solid. And so the idea that there are eternal truths that never change, that you could hang on to and they’re all written in a book, whichever book it happens to be, becomes a framework for putting your life back together.
