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1. They disagree on how to pronounce their last name

Justin and Louis are cousins (their dads are brothers) and spent a lot of time together growing up, often when Louis’s family would visit America. They obviously share a last name, yet they don’t agree on how it’s supposed to be pronounced. “You go by ‘ther-oo’ and I go by ‘ther-oh’,” says Justin. “Or to put it another way,” Louis responds, “I use the correct pronunciation, and you use some weird, incorrect one.” Louis is determined he’s correct, because the name is French. “If you want to get technical,” says Justin, “when you go to France, they say… ’terr-oo’.” They do not come to an agreement.

2. He’s starring in a TV show based on a book by Louis’s dad

When the pair speak, Justin is in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I’m shooting The Mosquito Coast,” he says, which happens to be an adaptation of the novel of the same name, written by Louis’s dad. “Paul Theroux wrote it and now it’s going to be a series starring Justin Theroux.” It’s the story of an inventor who takes his family to South America, to get away from society and starts to lose his mind. It was previously made into a film in 1986, with Harrison Ford in the role Justin will play.

3. He feels very lucky that he worked with David Lynch twice

Justin has been acting since 1996, appearing in films including Zoolander, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion and American Psycho. He says that one of the things he’s proudest of is working with the cult director David Lynch, on Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive. Before it became an Oscar-nominated film, Mulholland Drive was planned as a TV show. He says the network, ABC, misjudged what it meant to work with Lynch. “I don’t know what they thought they were going to get,” he says. “I think they thought they were going to be able to have more control of what David was shooting… My character smoked in the thing and there was a whole back and forth… 'There’s no smoking on television.’ And David said, ‘But people in the world smoke.’ He couldn’t understand it. He was so wonderfully detached in that way.” He and the network also fell out over a shot of dog poo. “David said, ‘Bring me anyone who hasn’t seen dog sh*t and I won’t shoot dog sh*t.’” Lynch swore never to do television again.

4. He only became a writer because of Ben Stiller

Justin has written, and co-written, films including Iron Man 2, Tropic Thunder and Zoolander 2. He says he never intended to become a writer. He just wanted to be an actor or an artist. Then Ben Stiller came along. “Ben was the one who reached back and grabbed me and said, ‘You can totally do this’,” he says. Justin met him while doing a play on Broadway with Stiller’s girlfriend. “We became friends. He used to do these really elaborate fun bits for like [David] Letterman or Conan [O’Brien] or The Tonight Show or whatever. I would help him come up with bits.” After helping him with his talk show interviews, Justin worked with Stiller on awards shows and other writing projects. “Then we locked on the idea for Tropic Thunder,” the 2008 comedy about a group of self-obsessed Hollywood stars accidentally going to war.

5. He was a short, scrawny kid

He may now be extremely handsome and so muscular that Louis spends several minutes making fun of his sleeveless t-shirts, but Justin says he was quite a scrawny kid. “I was incredibly skinny. Very short. I don’t think I went through a growth spurt until 11th grade.” He says he wasn’t a popular kid at school, “I wasn’t athletic. I wasn’t sporty, and I was a terrible student, so it made school very hard. But I was happy.” He says ultimately it was a good thing. “It helped, in the end. It gave me the sense of humour I have now.”

6. He was a hyperactive child

I thought, 鈥業 wonder what would happen if I threw this rock at the window?'

Justin Theroux

Justin says that as a kid he had trouble controlling his impulses. Louis remembers a time Justin threw a rock at a friend and sent him to hospital. “I threw a lot of rocks,” says Justin, then tells a story about another rock incident. “This is a perfect example of what it’s like to be a hyperactive kid: I was holding a rock and looking at it. I was on my street and a taxi went by… I thought, ‘I wonder what would happen if I threw this rock at the window?’… Before you even finish the thought, it’s happening, and it’s happened… I couldn’t get to the end of the thought.” It caused him huge problems in school, because he physically couldn’t stay still. “It was like I was given 10 gallons of gas every day, which I had to burn off somewhere.”

7. He couldn’t get through a book until he was a teenager

Part of Justin’s hyperactivity meant that he couldn’t concentrate enough to read. He is also dyslexic. “Reading a book was impossible,” he says. “Even if a book was 50 pages long, I’d read one page and go, ‘There’s 50 of these f**king things I’ve got to get through.’ By the time I’d got to the bottom of the page I couldn’t remember what was at the top.” He eventually learned to concentrate on reading, but says he still struggles with maths.

8. He once ate a polystyrene cup

Justin doesn’t fully recall this, but Louis remembers a time he saw Justin happily eating a polystyrene cup. “I would have been eight or nine, and you would have been seven,” says Louis. “There was a do at one of our uncles’ houses and I looked over and saw you were eating a polystyrene cup.” He then threw it up. “I have no recollection, but it’s entirely believable,” says Justin. “My mum used to give me glass cups and I would hook my [teeth] over the glass as I drank my drink. I would want to really badly bite the glass to the point of breaking. Many times… I would smash the glass, breaking glass into my mouth… Eventually she gave me plastic.”

9. He doesn’t think he deserves his Emmy awards

Justin recently won two Emmys, for the show Live in Front of a Studio Audience. He does not think he deserves them. He and Jimmy Kimmel had the idea of re-recording classic 70s sitcoms, like All in The Family and The Jeffersons, with new casts and broadcasting them live. “Me and Jimmy were on vacation together and I did smoke a little weed and I had an idea and said, ‘What we should do, man, we should get old sitcoms and we should do them with new actors, contemporary actors’… And Jimmy said, ‘That’s a really good idea’… That was the end of my contribution.” He says Kimmel went off and pitched it and got it made. “Then at the end of it I got an Emmy. But I promise you my only contribution was the idea, which Jimmy then improved on. I didn’t even pick up a pencil.”

10. He’s not dating Paris Hilton

Justin has repeatedly been in the news for his dating life. He married Jennifer Aniston in 2015. They separated in 2017, but remain friends: “Everything’s fine. That’s good.” He’s somewhat bemused when Louis asks if he’s dating Paris Hilton. “Who said that? [The internet is saying that] right now? Oh, I know. I posted a picture. I bumped into her in Chateau Marmont and I took a picture of her with my dog.” And that is all it takes to start Justin Theroux dating rumours.