As we reported last week, Louis Theroux’s dark new documentary focusing on the raging opiate epidemic will be out this month, and in the lead up press, Theroux has revealed the scariest moment he has ever encountered while filming.
Despite the far-flung locations he has hit, and the range of… let’s say, mental states that various interviewees have been in, it was close to home in the most mundane situation where he most feared for his life.
“One of the most nerve-racking moments I had was doing the alcohol documentary, Drinking to Oblivion, and we were in a south London flat,” he told Vice. “There was a guy that was mentally ill and another guy that seemed emotionally unstable, and we were going to shoot a sequence, and it became clear that this is not going to go well, and the mentally ill guy was going, ‘I’m not having that fucking camera anywhere near me,’ so I said, ‘It’s fine, mate, we’ll just quietly go,’ then one of them put their arm around my neck as though to throttle me, and the other one said, ‘Oi, if anyone’s going to do him then it’s going to be me,’ and I remember just thinking, ‘Wow, he’s going to snap my neck.’
“He was ex-Army, too, which suggests that he might actually know how to do that. I don’t remember how we got out of there, and not a frame of film was shot. I got out and thought, ‘That was ridiculous.’
“It’s one thing to be on location in the West Bank or Lagos and to feel nervous, but the idea that I was going to meet my dreary demise in a social housing estate in south London, close to where I grew up, just felt all wrong.”
