He is husband to one of the most famous women on Earth, a regular in the Hollywood gossip columns and a ripped pin-up for female fans around the world.

But Justin Theroux is also a heavily tattooed bike gang leader, a collector of gruesome antiquities as well as one of the most controversial screenwriters in Hollywood and an actor famous for playing weirdos.

The 46-year-old – nephew of star writer-novelist Paul and cousin of documentarian Louis – has spent most of his career trying to camouflage his looks and has shunned the normal route to stardom.

Olivia Munn and Justin Theroux holding their respective characters at event for "The LEGO Ninjago Movie"

So it’s no surprise that he takes more delight from sharing jokes with wife Jennifer Aniston than rocking red carpets or looking to impress the Instagram crowd.

And he said that he has amazing respect for Jennifer after getting an insight into the craziness of the limelight, adding he just tries to ignore the gossip which paints him as a villain in the star couple’s relationship.

Theroux said: “If nothing else, I have a front-row seat to the insanity, to what make this town so bananas.”

When he began dating Aniston in 2012, he was unwittingly sucked into the gossip storm.

In the multiverse of cyber-speculation, they keep splitting up, getting back together and splitting up, which he described as “this never-ending operative narrative on the pages of a magazine week to week”.

Jennifer and Justin attend the 89th Annual Academy Awards in February 2017

He calls that other Mr Theroux his avatar.

“It’s just not a part of me. There’s this slightly insane person running about on the covers of tabloids who is mentally ill, clearly,” he said.

“I think it does drive people insane and you can tell who those people are in the world. You have to be the guardian of your own senses.

“If a tree falls in the forest and you’re not there to see it, you know. But for the most part, it’s not as pervasive in our lives as people think.

“Occasionally you’ll get whacked by something. It’s definitely something you have to analyse and come to terms with. Which I think [my wife] has done very elegantly and pretty effortlessly.”

Justin Theroux stars in the 2001 mystery film Mulholland Drive

He added: “I think I came into our relationship the same person as I am now.”

Theroux grew up in Washington DC, the son of Phyllis Grissim-Theroux, a journalist and author, and Eugene Theroux, a corporate lawyer of half Italian, half French-Canadian descent, who is the brother of novelists Paul, Alexander and Peter Theroux.

He made his film debut in I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996, and his breakthrough role came in Mulholland Drive in 2001. It was in New York that Theroux met his lifelong buddy-collaborators Ben Stiller and Paul Rudd on the acting circuit.

He could have joined both of them, and future wife Aniston on the A-list, if he’d employed a better alarm clock the day he was supposed to audition for Friends.

Theroux said: “I didn’t bother. I slept in that day. I wouldn’t have been prepared for [the fame].”

Justin also starred in "The Girl on The Train"

His screenwriting has most famously included the acclaimed but controversial comedy
Tropic Thunder, a film in which he asked Robert Downey Jr to black up in parody and supplied the most politically incorrect joke in Hollywood history – “You never go full retard”.

And his own performances always pack a surprise punch.

The darker part of his CV includes playing a suicidal twice-murdered schizophrenic
cop-turned-messiah in a new world order of cults in The Leftovers.

He played the lead in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in 2001 and Inland Empire five years later, as well as the psychopathic boyfriend in Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt.

He was also Derek Zoolander’s dreadlocked nemesis Evil DJ, a murderous Irish gangster with a mohican in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and a hippie Don Juan, leader of a free-love commune, in Wanderlust, which co-starred his now wife Aniston along with his friend Rudd.

Theroux said: “It’s a very bipolar career. There’s no strategy or logical sense, and I think my Wikipedia page proves that.”

He has just been seen in the third and final series of hit drama The Leftovers, and will be heard in upcoming Lego Ninjago Movie.

Justin and Jennifer attend "The Leftovers" premiere

The Leftovers has been a sleeper hit. It was heralded by The New York Times as “transcendent television”, yet was largely omitted from this year’s Emmys list, even though Aniston and their friend, chat show host Jimmy Kimmel, hijacked Theroux’s black Mercedes and spray-painted it with a campaign poster of his naked body.

He said: “I was p****d off. Like, ‘Take it back. Fix it’.

“I think it’s because we weren’t particularly a zeitgeisty show. We didn’t have any big sell.”

Next up is Mute for Duncan Jones (responsible for critically acclaimed sci-fi movies Moon and Source Code, and the son of David Bowie) which is a neo-Noir set in futurist Berlin.

Theroux is not one to moan about first-world Hollywood problems such as the loss of anonymity he had formerly enjoyed, thanks to his marriage to one of the least
anonymous women in the world.

Justin Theroux stars with Carrie Coon in American TV hit The Leftovers

It’s a relief that he hasn’t turned into one of the pious, self-involved actors he once parodied.

He once ran a Hollywood biker gang, Satan’s Hooves, while his LA house is decorated with a skull and human teeth because, he insisted, it was “just as a reminder 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”.

But he does keep the worst aspects of it away from former Friends star Jen.

“That’s why they’re in my office,” he said. “When it’s not funny, she calls me out. She says, ‘That’s not funny’.

Jennifer and husband Justin

“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.”

Aniston herself summed him up, saying: “At first you think he could be like a serial killer but he is actually the nicest person in the world.”

● Read the full interview in The Journal at www.mrporter.com