Justin Theroux on playing the bad guy — in movies and his marriage

When Justin Theroux started dating Jennifer Aniston, his urbane biker look generated some serious supermarket-tabloid side-eye. “Like, ‘Mr. Wrong,’ ‘He Sucks,’ whatever,” Theroux says, laughing. “‘Who is this guy, how dare he?’”

This was the inevitable challenge of courting America’s sweetheart. “My wife is very beloved,” Theroux says. “As she is by me. So there was this thing of, ‘Who’s this dark, horrible person?’ Maybe the fact that I wear a lot of black had something to do with that.”

But at 46, and having just celebrated their second wedding anniversary, he’s comfortable saying his look is here to stay. “I’m not gonna take any wild fashion swings at this point,” the “Leftovers” star tells Alexa on the set of our cover shoot. “I’m pretty much black jeans, black boots and T-shirts. Makes laundry very simple.”

‘At first you think he could be, like, a serial killer, but he is actually the nicest person in the world.’

 - Jennifer Aniston

Theroux’s monochromatic uniform may give off a don’t-F-with-me vibe, but get him talking and his cover is blown: He’s warm, open and quick with a joke. It’s a light-dark balance that’s reflected in his acting career, which ranges from dramatic and brooding (“The Girl on the Train,” “Mulholland Dr.,” “American Psycho”) to shamelessly goofy (“Wanderlust,” “The Ten,” “Your Highness”). As Aniston once put it, “At first you think he could be, like, a serial killer, but he is actually the nicest person in the world.”

The two sides are both at work on his latest gig, voicing black-clad bad guy Garmadon in “The Lego Ninjago Movie.” For a man who just spent three seasons marinating in grief on HBO’s show about the Rapture, Theroux found the villain’s cackle to be a surprisingly heavy lift. “One whole recording session, they just wanted maniacal laughter,” he says. “It’s like a workout. By the end I never wanted to maniacally laugh again.”

But he does laugh, albeit not quite maniacally, when describing his new obsession: “I just found a Netflix show I’m addicted to, called ‘Embarrassing Bodies,’” he says. “It’s the most English thing I’ve ever seen. They set up a mobile clinic in Leeds, and say, ‘You’re welcome to pop in here if you have something you don’t want your doctor to see.’ It cracks us up. It’s always way worse than you thought it was going to be, and there’s no pixelation!”

In keeping with his fascination with the medically macabre, Theroux owns Victorian-era wax models of syphilitic throats. “It’s different stages of affliction,” he says, “basically, ‘Something’s wrong with my throat,’ all the way through, ‘Jesus, God, why haven’t they invented penicillin yet?’” It stays strictly in his home office.

The strange collection surely delights his cadre of hilarious pals, including Jason Bateman, whom the paparazzi tagged as being in a bromance with Theroux after the two were snapped holding hands at a charity event. “I trusted Jason that he and I were having a bromance,” Theroux jokingly sighs. “And then someone else sent me a picture of him and [Will] Arnett having a bromance a couple years ago. Imagine my surprise! This wasn’t his first time doing this to someone in a bromantic way. I felt used.”

“Some of the funniest people in the world are my friends,” he adds quickly, “which I am so grateful for.”

As far as outward appearances, Theroux is a student of highbrow/lowbrow style, as is evident from his extensive collection of old T-shirts. “A large portion are my actual shirts from when I was age 13 up,” he says. “There’s no reason to ever throw out a great T-shirt. I have a whole collection of Desert Storm shirts, I love those. And spring break shirts, which I think are hilarious.” He frequently browses for them on Etsy, but also relishes a Goodwill find: “I was just in Austin and got an amazing Eazy-E shirt for a buck 50!”

His attitude toward body art, meanwhile, can best be described as, “Why the hell not?” If you’ve watched “The Leftovers,” you’ve seen his biggest tattoo, which nearly covers his entire back. “It’s a rat and a pigeon. It represents New York,” he says. “It took four sessions. It was horrible. I had the sweats, a fever.” He managed to survive — and then move on to just about every other inch of his body. “I have a ton on my legs,” he says. “It looks like someone loaded a shotgun with ink and shot me up. It’s just a place to doodle. The sketchbook is everything from my hips down.”

Theroux keeps his “sketchbook” — and everything above it — in spectacularly good shape. The longtime New Yorker used to skateboard and bike everywhere, including, in the early ’90s, to his job as a bartender at East Village watering hole Von. Gyms were not his thing. “I’d ride by them on my skateboard and be like, ‘Who the hell wants to go into a box and run on a treadmill?’” He affects a Zoolander-esque voice: “You get on a thing and run, but you literally are going nowhere.”

Then he moved to LA (while keeping an apartment in downtown Manhattan), where gyms became a necessity. His weight-training nemesis now, he says, is a sled designed to mimic farm work. Appropriate, considering that Theroux attended a Massachusetts boarding school that “was a very chop-wood, carry-water kind of place. It was grounded in socialist beliefs. It gave you a great appreciation of having heat. When there wasn’t any, you’d be like, ‘Who the hell didn’t chop the wood?’”

Still, there are moments when he can’t believe he’s turned into such a health nut. “One time a friend who’d quit sugar was going, ‘Man, this apple is delicious.’ I thought, ‘Ugh, who reaches for an apple in the afternoon?’ Now I’m that guy. When you quit sugar, an apple tastes like a Snickers bar. I understand how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s true.”

Theroux has long cultivated a satirical view of the entertainment industry. As a screenwriter, he poured it into 2008’s “Tropic Thunder” and 2016’s “Zoolander 2,” on which he collaborated with Ben Stiller and others. He also wrote 2010’s “Iron Man 2” solo and collaborated on 2012’s “Rock of Ages.” Writing, after all, is in his DNA: His mother, Phyllis Grissim-Theroux, is an essayist and former Washington Post reporter; one uncle, Paul, is a celebrated travel writer and another, Alexander, is a novelist and poet; his cousins are the documentarian Louis and the novelist Marcel.

But Theroux, who graduated from Bennington College with a Bachelor of Arts in drama and visual arts, is quick to lowball his own skills within the family pantheon. “If I have a knack for anything, it’s writing dialogue,” he says. “I was dyslexic growing up, and I think my ear tuned itself to hearing conversation, just as a survival mechanism, having to bulls–t for not having done the reading.”

Naturally, he gravitates toward quality writing. His next film will be “Mute,” from writer-director Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) alongside co-stars Paul Rudd and Alexander Skarsgard. And he’s still in awe of the weird, wild storylines for his “Leftovers” character Kevin Garvey. “That’s a whole other caliber of writing I can’t wrap my brain around,” he says. Especially in the first season, he recalls, “I would really have to turn off my satirical everything. If for a second I started to see the comedy of playing a guy who cries every week, I would immediately want to mock it.”

Also on his to-mock list: the endless gossip items about him and Aniston getting a nasty divorce, reconciling, having triplets, etc. “When the term ‘fake news’ came out, we were like, ‘Oh really, you’re all just learning this?’ Because we’ve known about it for a while.”