Louis Theroux is a British-American documentarian, journalist, broadcaster, and author. He has received three British Academy Television Awards and a Royal Television Society Television Award.
Even with those accolades, he may not be that familiar to American audiences, but he is very good at interviewing people. I've seen him on clips from the BBC series When Louis Met... (2000–02), when Theroux accompanied a different British celebrity in each program in their daily lives, interviewing them as they go.
He's no Jimmy Fallon. He’s much better.
Theroux has a new Spotify podcast, eponymously called The Louis Theroux Podcast.
The
new nine-part series will feature a lineup of fascinating
guests, notable in their chosen fields.
Season one of The Louis Theroux Podcast will feature
conversations with Shania Twain, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Craig David, Tan
France, Nick Cave, Jennette McCurdy, Nile Rodgers, Samantha Morton and
Ben Elton.
Joining Theroux to kick off the series is singer/songwriting Shania Twain. Louis and Twain talk candidly about her extremely challenging childhood; how her career started by singing in strip clubs to support her family, the abuse from her stepfather, the sudden death of her parents during her rise to fame, and her musical inspirations.
I knew the interview would be different in a positive way when Theroux allowed listeners to hear the preamble to set up the tech, where Theroux shows off his limited French vocabulary and then intones, "I'm on 50 days straight on Duolingo."
The interview begins with Theroux asking Twain if he can call her by her real name, which is Eileen Edwards. She agrees.
During the interview, it's obvious that Theroux has done an impressive amount of research for the interview. His questions eschew superficiality, and we quickly learn that Twain is a thoughtful, intuitive, and astute person with a life story that has all the components of a classic country song.
Twain starts the interview by revealing that, in order to support her family, she started working as a bar singer at eight-years-old into the early hours of the morning and that she was a taxpayer at 11 years old, stating “I didn’t start making money in bars until I was 11. Officially, so when I was 11 I was a taxpayer, I was earning money under contract in the bars”.
She touched on how she has suffered from crippling stage fright and how singing to drunk men in strip clubs at a young age was intimidating. She said that this led to her to feel anxiety about performing. She states: “I think if I'm being really fair to my history, and the history of the anxiety, I would say that it really was initiated from childhood and being in those bars where it was a very intimidating environment. Because I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to go up on that stage. I'm like, Oh, but I did it for my mother”
She goes on to talk about how her stepfather physically abused her and her mother, who was diagnosed with depression. She confessed that there were ‘so many levels of abuse’, both physical and sexual, even stating that “both my mother and father threatened to kill each other, they would confess it to me” and “I really thought he was capable of killing us”.
When her parents died in a car crash when Shania was 22, she then had to support her four siblings through her music career.
Lastly, Twain discusses how she fell in love with music producer Mutt Lange who then cheated on her with her personal assistant. But she has long since found love again with Frédéric Thiébaud. Throughout it all, however, she confesses how music and songwriting have always been her source of inspiration and drive. Commenting on the affair, she states: “I will never forget how I felt through all of that, you know, shock and then the recovery period, but I'm just really over those negative feelings because I just worked through them.”
What I think makes this podcast unique and ear worthy among the hundreds of podcast interview shows is Theroux. He has that English dry wit that's engaging, and he manages a celebrity interview deftly -- asks incisive questions, listens well, and respects his listeners. Theroux doesn't pander, nor does he fawn. Instead, he elevates a People magazine-type celebrity interview into a sonic exploration of a famous person.
The choice of Shania Twain as the first episode was a smart one, since Twain's fame came at the cost of family tragedy, a challenging childhood, and a music career dotted with personal and romantic calamities.
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