Justin Theroux
Creative concept and art direction for Mr Porter The Journal. Read an abstract from the article, below:
The sun is shining down on Hotel Bel-Air at just the right temperature. Here, everything seems controlled by iPad: the coy blush pink of the walls, the water gently sprinkling on the hydrangeas, even the swans gliding in the moat. But there is one rupture in all of this pleasantry, and he’s sitting in a booth at the hotel’s Wolfgang Puck restaurant, a devotee of New York punk, Grim Reaper tattoos and nicotine (taken orally and frequently), who once headed up his own motorcycle gang, Satan’s Hooves. The wall behind him is bedecked in candles as if were his own private crypt.
The sun is shining down on Hotel Bel-Air at just the right temperature. Here, everything seems controlled by iPad: the coy blush pink of the walls, the water gently sprinkling on the hydrangeas, even the swans gliding in the moat. But there is one rupture in all of this pleasantry, and he’s sitting in a booth at the hotel’s Wolfgang Puck restaurant, a devotee of New York punk, Grim Reaper tattoos and nicotine (taken orally and frequently), who once headed up his own motorcycle gang, Satan’s Hooves. The wall behind him is bedecked in candles as if were his own private crypt.
The anomalous one, Mr Justin Theroux, is describing the decor of his home office, with key mood-setters that include waxwork models of gonorrhoea-afflicted throats, bowls of human teeth and grisly dental equipment. He keeps a skull, Hamlet-like, on his writing desk “just as a reminder, you know, of the impermanence of it all. Oh, and I have a print of a Victorian-era lithograph of a little girl with syphilis on her face. You know, just like every other house in Bel Air.”
Mr Theroux is the actor and screenwriter who recently wrapped on HBO’s third and final series of the critically acclaimed drama The Leftovers. He is an outré satirist of the po-faced worlds of Hollywood and high fashion (he co-wrote Tropic Thunder and Zoolander 2 with Mr Ben Stiller), a man of many beardy cameos and, at 46, the ripped and inked torso du jour. Oh, and he’s half of one of Hollywood’s most photographed, not to mention scrutinised, couples.
His Chapman Brothers-esque collection of medical curios has been, for the most part, banished from his home (an expansive mid-century modern affair designed by Mr A Quincy Jones) by his wife of two years, master of rom-comic timing Ms Jennifer Aniston. It’s hard not to wish to be a fly on the wall just to catch some of their domestic banter. Didn’t she find the gonorrhoea throats amusing?
“That’s why they’re in my office,” says Mr Theroux. “When it’s not funny, she calls me out. She says, ‘That’s not funny.’” Does she allow fart jokes in the house? (Mr Theroux is not above such things.) “Of course she would allow a fart joke, but I think she actually has a more refined sense of humour than to crack a fart joke. I think she’s funnier than that.” He rolls out the sentence, low and chilled-out, punctuated with chuckles. As if he can’t help but see the ridiculousness of it all.
Read the full article here.
Read the full article here.
