Justin Theroux and Woody Harrelson cover the latest (digital) issue of Esquire, all to promote their new HBO/Max series, White House Plumbers. I don’t really understand why all of these Watergate-intensive series are being greenlit by various networks and studios, but this is like the fourth one in the past two years? Why all the fascination with Watergate? In any case, Justin Theroux plays G. Gordon Liddy and Harrelson plays E. Howard Hunt. They are the “White House Plumbers,” aka the ratf–kers. I skimmed this dual interview and it was pretty boring. They’re trying to lean into the idea that Woody and Justin are BFFs and I don’t think that’s the case, but whatever. A few of Justin’s answers were sort of interesting though:

Theroux isn’t political: “In different ways. I don’t know. It’s weird. God, I don’t consider myself terribly political. Being in the arts, I’ve been to my fair share of protests and made donations and done letter writing, but now I want to stay out of it and just do my work and hopefully that has an impact. I think, especially when it comes to humor or satire, I can do more if I stay in my lane.

Theroux doesn’t believe in big-state conspiracies: “One of the reasons why I don’t think there’s some sort of big deep-state conspiracy is that I’ve been able to see that it’s not this big Oz that’s up there controlling things. Living and growing up in D.C., you realize these are just government workers. You pull the curtain back and people are just pulling small levers. They might be pulling them the wrong way and doing things you don’t want them to do, but the FBI is not a big, cool, dark room with tons of computer screens wrapping around the thing. It’s offices with cubicles and pencil holders.

Whether he reads the comments: “The Internet is like this really big high school, and why on earth would you walk around it checking every room and broom closet for the bully to kick your ass? I don’t linger.”

Theroux on being “inside the maelstrom of social-media users theorizing about your personal life, mainly in your divorce from Jennifer Aniston.” “There’s something to, once you’re out of that, where I want all of my relationships to exist within the four walls of whatever room we’re in. And I’m not trying to be evasive, but I talk to Jen—I don’t talk about Jen. People will always want to gossip and say things, but you have to find that balance. And having been in a public relationship, it’s much more fun not being in a public relationship. Me saying anything, even if it was something loving, it would just turn into a thing. So it’s a classic no-comment situation for me.

[From Esquire]

I definitely appreciate the fact that everyone in the media got the memo that we’re not supposed to say that Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston were “married.” What they had was not a legal marriage, as we only discovered once they broke up, and neither of them has ever acknowledged that they lied for years about it. As for Justin’s discomfort at being part of a public relationship… he certainly enjoyed the spoils of it. Once he dumped Heidi Bivens and got with Aniston, he signed onto CAA and started booking all kinds of new roles. Almost as if that was the implicit quid pro quo. But whatever, we never hear anything about his personal life these days, so I buy that he really, really doesn’t like being gossiped about.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Esquire.