Louis Theroux on the Manosphere: ‘It’s Highly Profitable to Be a Dick on the Internet’

With the release of his Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, the director talked to WIRED about why so many young men are drawn to toxic influencers.

It’s been over 30 years since Louis Theroux was first given an opportunity to make documentaries as a reporter on Michael Moore’s TV Nation.

Since then Theroux has become the preeminent documenter of the weird, the extreme, and the dangerous, filming everyone from members of the Westboro Baptist Church to ultra-Zionists in the West Bank.

But in Inside the Manosphere, his first film with Netflix, out March 11, Theroux is tackling what he only somewhat jokingly describes to WIRED as “the final boss battle in the gamified career of Louis Theroux.”

“I've been circling this subject” for years, Theroux tells WIRED from the Squid Game meeting room in Netflix’s London headquarters. “It combines cultlike groupings, misogyny, adult content, creation of ...