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Louis Theroux’s success as a rapper has been one of the most surprising stories of 2022 — and he’s now collaborated with Jason Derulo for a music video.
The documentary maker became an unlikely rap sensation when he appeared on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date series earlier this year and repeated a rap he had learned for an episode of his series Weird Weekends in 2000. The clip went viral on TikTok and has since been remixed thousands of times, sparking Theroux’s surprise collaboration with Jason Derulo for Jiggle Jiggle. In the video, Theroux and Dimoldenberg recreate the Chicken Shop Date sequence before driving off to order “500 nuggets” from a “Drive Theroux”, while Derulo joins in with a verse of his own.
Variations of Jiggle Jiggle have been streamed more than 70 million times on TikTok after producing duo Duke & Jones set the Chicken Shop Date clip to music. It was subsequently turned into a dance craze by performing arts students Jess Qualter and Brooke Blewitt, which only enhanced its virality. Theroux admitted earlier this year in an interview with the New York Times that he has “a degree of mixed feelings” about the success he has experienced as a rapper.
He said: “It’s a bittersweet thing to experience a breakthrough moment of virality through something that, on the face of it, seems so disposable and so out of keeping with what it is that I actually do in my work. But there we are.” In the same interview, he dismissed any prospect of becoming a touring act on the rap scene — despite the fact he’s behind one of the most popular verses of recent years. He said: “It’s not like I have a catalogue and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments. I’m clearly not going to tour it. Come see Mr. Jiggle himself. It would be a 20-second-long gig.”
