How Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score exposed the Manosphere in Louis Theroux documentary

“Are you getting triggered?” Louis Theroux asks in the new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere. For the millions who watched the film, after hearing the nuggets of wisdom offered up by the toxic bros scraped up from the bottom of the manosphere content creator barrel, the answer is likely yes. When it came to writing a manoscore, BAFTA Award-winning, Emmy and Ivor Novello–nominated composer Paul Leonard-Morgan knew a conventional documentary soundtrack simply wouldn’t cut it – it needed something sharper, stranger, and far more unsettling.

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere dives into the controversial online world known as the “manosphere” – a network of influencers and communities promoting hypermasculine ideals, “red-pill” thinking, misogyny, and an opposition to feminism, and sees an ever-curious Theroux spend time with prominent creators who run various monetised podcasts, livestreams and social channels aimed largely at disenfranchised young men.

The film also pulls back the curtain on the business behind it all – a disturbing masterclass on monetising the fragile male ego through deliberately provocative content designed to go viral, memberships and coaching programmes. At its core, the documentary explores why these ideas resonate, how they spread online, and what happens when identity, influence and profit collide in the algorithm-driven world of social media.

For all his experience in film, TV and game scoring (Limitless, Cyberpunk 2077, Dredd, The Tomorrow Man, Reflections Upon the Origin of the Pineapple and new Uma Thurman-starring ballet action thriller, Pretty Lethal), this was Leonard-Morgan’s first introduction to the murky world of the manosphere.

“I collaborated with Ross Hamilton on this, a great music producer, and we were chatting about one of the scenes where HSTikkyTokky [one of the more meme-able subjects from the documentary] was saying, ‘I’m not getting out of bed until I’ve made $5,000,’ so everyone starts giving him $50 until he gets up,” recalls Leonard-Morgan from his home in L.A.

“You understand that it comes from a good place: self-improvement, trying to better yourself, work out, dress nicely, whatever. But after a while, you realise it’s just complete BS. When you start getting into that, I had this sudden horror of how people don’t see through this, and then it ties in with the rest of society in general: how do people not see through the BS in anything, whether it’s politics, the manosphere, or whatever? I struggle to understand how people don’t see it.”

Following a decades-long career primarily associated with the BBC, Theroux’s debut as a presenter for Netflix was a huge hit, and while drawing attention to the algorithmic nature of controversial content clipped up for TikTok attention spans, the film, in turn, was marketed and shared online in bite-sized reactionary snippets of its most outrageous moments. The irony is not lost on Leonard-Morgan.

“It just exploded. It was the number one documentary on Netflix around the world, and what’s been incredible is seeing the number of memes, the amount of social media commentary, and legitimate commentary from people. It’s really opened up a discussion, which is fantastic, and was needed for this pretty horrendous subject matter. There's this kind of bizarre circle about that,” he points out. 

“The irony of writing these pieces is that your TikTok attention span is about 10,15 seconds, and the Instagram attention span is around 15 to 30 seconds. So we were scoring it as a film, but were trying to come up with a super short motif that was not signposting people as good or bad. It's got an edginess and a manosphere undercurrent to it. So many people have got in touch since and said, ‘Man, I work out to this album!’”

Throughout the documentary, Theroux meets various ‘influencers’ who proudly impart their insight on "one-way monogamy", coaching boys to be boys in a world they perceive as being rigged against them, demonstrating toxic feuding, homophobia, and in one particularly disturbing moment, orchestrate and film an alleged child predator sting and assault. 

This is all against a steady and predictable backdrop of promoting anti-feminist, "traditional" values (all the while gleefully profiting from women who work on OnlyFans), and clip-farming for attention and profit – regardless of whether they believe that what they’re saying is true or not.

Objectively, these are not likeable men, whose only loyalty seems to be to wearing sunglasses indoors and growing beards solely on their chins, but Leonard-Morgan didn’t want to go overboard when scoring certain moments or personalities, despite feeling frustrated with the difficult subject matter.

“Frustrated in the sense that you don’t want to paint them as arch villains, because then people start empathising with them,” Leonard-Morgan explains. 

“People often root for the anti-hero, or even the outright villain, so you don’t want to present them that way. You’ve got all these guys talking, and you listen, but you’re careful not to give them their own motifs as characters. Instead, we gave them a shared sound. It’s not happy, it’s not sad – the main motif has both a major third and a minor third, so it feels unsettling. It’s about giving the documentary an overall sense of unease, neither happy nor sad, but with momentum.”

Indeed, this is not a typical documentary score – all pulsing electronics, layered orchestral swells, and rhythmic motifs over unsettling, crunched up beats, guitars, Moogs, and Miami sounds. “This is a Netflix documentary, so you really need to keep people engaged, because streamers are all about keeping people glued,” Leonard-Morgan says. 

“An orchestra just doesn’t work for something like The Manosphere, because it would distract from the actual characters. You’ve got people working out and people talking about misogyny, so it was about coming up with a current sound – almost something people would listen to anyway.”

To achieve a score fit for the incurably insecure, Leonard-Morgan used a Rhodes keyboard with a tape delay underscored with cinematic bass and crunched-up beats. He explains what sets it apart from other electronic music and subtly creates an opportunity to make the viewer feel uncomfortable.

“It’s a technique I’ve developed over the years,” he discloses. “Underneath those heated discussions between Louis and the interviewees, we suddenly drop out the bass. For some reason, as an audience, you can’t quite work out why, but you suddenly become completely focused on Louis and whoever he’s interviewing. You still have the pulsing, arpeggiated keyboards, but no bass. 

"So you don’t quite know why, but suddenly you’re listening to the dialogue far more closely, and the music’s taken over the internet, the way the whole Manosphere thing has,” he adds.

“People have written dissertations on the soundtrack, with people trying to work out why they felt a certain way, and when they analysed it, they realised there was no bass. It’s mad. You forget that the hundreds of millions of people watching this film will start analysing it. To feel part of something that’s in everyone’s conversation at the moment is great.”

Theroux is known for feigning a mild, non-threatening curiosity during interviews, along with using his trademark blank stares and long silences to make conversations (more) uncomfortable, compelling subjects to fill the void. This also played into the music choices.

“Louis has this wonderful technique of just letting people give themselves enough rope to hang themselves,” Leonard-Morgan nods. “He’s not intentionally trying to trip them up, but a lot of people do that anyway – particularly these podcasters who want to prove to Louis, ‘You’re old school, I’m new school’. It’s bizarre, because they end up digging their own grave – there are comedy pauses, and there are genuine pauses.”

Leonard-Morgan points to an early scene in the film as an example: “There’s a comedy pause in the opening theme. You’ve got this pulsing, muted bass, with the motif over the top, and then it cuts to Louis. Someone’s taking the piss out of him online, he’s looking at it, then he turns to the camera and asks, ‘Do I sound like that?’ Then he pauses and says, ‘A little bit.’

"It took bloody ages, because they kept recutting it. Every time you think you’ve nailed the beat – because it's almost a bass-drop moment – we’d have to redo it. We ended up cutting the music there for seven beats. But getting exactly seven beats was crucial – if you did six and a half, for some reason, it just wasn’t as funny. We had to get the tempo exactly right so that his pause felt like the fill of a bar.”

Despite trying to get one up on the presenter, those on the receiving end of Theroux’s steady stare feel compelled to fill the silence in the film, with interviewee, Justin Waller, (who at first feigns not being able to keep track of how many children he has: two) poignantly offering, “Stings, huh?” after divulging that his partner isn’t allowed to talk to other men.

“There are moments where he’s interviewing people, and you need that awkward silence,” agrees Leonard-Morgan. 

“Silence is so powerful, isn’t it? The natural tendency, especially in interviews, is to fill those gaps, and that’s when people fall down the rabbit hole, because they say the first thing that comes into their head. Particularly with these guys, that’s when they suddenly let something slip – some kind of truth they didn’t mean to reveal. So in those moments, there's no music, because you’ve got to let it breathe.”

“Mummy, I don't want a juice bar”

Leonard-Morgan once again lets silence do the talking in one of the film’s most ridiculed moments, when, after being told off by his mother, HSTikkyTokky whines, “Mummy, I don’t want a juice bar”.

“To begin with, that bit was supposed to be right at the end of the film,” Leonard-Morgan reveals. “The music was actually quite a downer, because you don’t want to play it up emotionally – as in, ‘Yay, life is good, we’re all fine’. You can juxtapose music, so you can have happy music against sad visuals, and sad music against happy visuals. But putting sad music against a line like that felt counterintuitive. 

"So in the end, I said, ‘This ending is ramping up to the end credits; it should have the feeling that this guy is digging his own grave – you’re starting to see him for what he is’. You don’t need sad music there. It’s not about signposting, it’s about having a general sense of momentum. It's at that point that we start introducing the Moog-style bass underneath, leading into the end credits. But yeah, it’s very funny,” he grins, adding that his personal favourite moment to score was a workout scene.

“I actually don’t usually watch my work, but I watched The Manosphere because it was number one on Netflix,” he says humbly. “I thought, ‘Well, it’s quite good!’ I love the workout scene, which is about five minutes in. You’ve got HSTikkyTokky working out, and there’s a moment where Louis turns to him and jokes, 'Calves need a little work,' and he replies, 'They do'. 

"You suddenly see that bit of insecurity, even though Louis is taking the piss. That theme we’ve got going there, with the drums – we really nailed it. We suddenly knew what we were doing with the overall sound of the show. That whole sequence makes me laugh every time I see it, and that’s where you really start getting into the film.”

The tech behind the Manoscore

Leonard-Morgan, who has a studio in his native Scotland and in L.A., shares that as well as owning “an awful lot of Apple gear”, instrumental to the Inside the Manosphere score were his trio of trusty synths: his Moog Matriarch, Roland JUPITER-X, and Sequential Pro 3.

“Those three get used for pretty much anything when I’m going for big, chunky sounds,” he explains. “The JUPITER-X has such fat sounds – even though it’s digital, it’s got that Roland character, so I use that a lot, stacking two or three sounds together for lead parts.”

His composing partner, Hamilton, meanwhile, favours a Minimoog-style UADx soft synth, allowing them to swap things easily. “I use Digital Performer, he uses Logic, but we send MIDI files back and forth and try things out in different setups,” he elaborates. “It’s much easier with soft synths – you can just save the plugins – whereas with real outboard gear you have to record it as audio, send it over, and ask, ‘Do you like this?’”

When it comes to plugins, Leonard-Morgan has a clear favourite: “I’ve collected pretty much every Arturia plugin under the sun. People always ask if they sponsor me,” he laughs, “but

I just love their stuff. I’ve also got three Arturia KeyLab keyboards here: the 88 MKII, the 61, and a smaller one. I’ve got the same setup in my Glasgow studio. I use a lot of Arturia, plus Zebra and Diva synth plugins from U-he, because you can get deep into sound design with those. 

"I also use Slate Digital plugins, and Soundtoys’ Decapitator gets used a lot. For monitoring, I’ve got Adam Audio speakers. Ross actually went and bought a pair of A77X monitors as well, so we’ve got similar monitoring across both studios.”

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is streaming on Netflix.

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere image credits: Courtesy of Netflix