Louis Theroux reveals the scariest moment he’s ever experienced while filming

The documentary maker's latest programme, 'Dark States – Heroin Town', will air on the BBC on Sunday (October 8)

Louis Theroux has revealed the most frightening moment he’s ever experienced while filming one of his documentaries.

Theroux’s latest programme, Dark States – Heroin Town, will air on Sunday night on BBC Two (October 8). The film will look at “America’s love affair with prescription painkillers” that has “led to widespread dependency on opiates”.

Speaking ahead of the premiere of Dark States, Theroux looked back over his previous work to disclose the scariest moment he’s ever encountered while filming.

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“Touch wood, I’ve largely been quite lucky,” he told Vice. “The situations that have been the most frightening tend to be off-camera, because you haven’t reached that trust level where you feel comfortable starting to film, or the situation has broken down to the point where you no longer feel comfortable filming.

Louis Theroux NME Awards 2017

“One of the most nerve-racking moments I had was doing the alcohol documentary, Drinking to Oblivion [April 2016], and we were in a south London flat,” he revealed. “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.

Following Dark States, two more new Theroux documentaries will air – one called Murder In Milwaukee and another titled Sex Trafficking Houston.

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