Playboy Interview: Christiane Amanpour

An impeachment scandal is in full swing, and attacks on the press erupt almost daily from the White House. The year, of course, is 1973.

In his Playboy Interview from that year, legendary CBS anchor Walter Cronkite was “visibly steamed” by a question about the Nixon administration—which at that time was halfway between the Watergate break-in and the president’s resignation—and its war on the news media. The fatherly newsman gave a strident critique of what he called a “well-directed campaign against the press, agreed upon in secret by members of the administration.”

In 2019, another American president has declared war on the free press and is facing impeachment. But today’s most venerated defender of newsmen’s rights is not a newsman at all: It’s Christiane Amanpour, the British Iranian war reporter turned CNN and PBS host. Crisp, elegant and unshakably poised, Amanpour uses her nightly CNN International show to delve into global affairs, interrogate newsmakers and occasionally rip to pieces the lies and obfuscations uttered by the world’s most powerful men. Amanpour began her reporting career in a world just introduced to 24-hour news coverage, and even in an age of fake news and overflowing Twitter time lines she remains our guide across borders worldwide.

Born in London to a British Catholic mother and a much older Iranian Muslim father, Amanpour spent a charmed childhood in Tehran, riding Arabian stallions and skiing through the winter. At 11, she was sent to a British convent school; she would remain in the English educational system through high school. By the time she enrolled at the University of Rhode Island to study journalism, Iran was in the throes of a revolution. The Amanpour family fled to England, starting anew in a cramped flat. For the nascent journalist of the family, that historical moment marked a turning point. “I knew what I wanted to do,” she said in a 2013 Mediabistro interview. “I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.”

Starting out at Providence, Rhode Island’s NBC affiliate, Amanpour soon heard about a new network called CNN. It was a ragtag place, she was told, where they might be more amenable to an olive-toned British-accented woman reporting the news. She made the switch, and Christiane Amanpour as we know her was born.

Name a major conflict of the past 30 years, and Amanpour reported from it. Operation Desert Storm was her first, but she truly cut her teeth covering the Balkans, where her sense of moral outrage mounted as she watched Serb atrocities and the targeting of her friends and colleagues. Reporting the news, she concluded in Bosnia, requires accuracy and proportionality, not simplistic both-sidesism—an ethical code she has since called “truthful, not neutral.”

That ethos has served her well as she’s interviewed petulant leaders and seldom-questioned strongmen—she had an exclusive sit-down with soon-to-be-ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in the midst of the revolution in Cairo, was among the last journalists to interview Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and was once told to “be quiet” by Yasir Arafat before he hung up on her—and shapes her approach to the Trump era. It has also made her a credible voice in the age of #MeToo: She’s a reporter for whom feminism is a simple commitment to equality, not an extremist takeover that threatens to destroy due process. And it makes her a fitting replacement for Charlie Rose, a man felled by his alleged predation on and harassment of younger women, and in whose place Amanpour & Company now airs on PBS.

In 1998 she married former U.S. assistant secretary of state James Rubin; two years later she had their son, Darius, at the age of 42. Now, at 61 and recently divorced after 20 years of marriage, Amanpour is opening a new chapter she calls her “sexy 60s.” That storyline started in familiar territory: reporting. Her six-episode series Sex & Love Around the World premiered on Netflix in 2018, revealing Amanpour as a winning and surprisingly cheeky chronicler of female lust, pleasure and desire.

Amanpour sat down with journalist (and freelance CNN.com columnist) Jill Filipovic for PLAYBOY in Amanpour’s office at CNN’s London headquarters, where a sign on the door, illustrated with an AK-47, reads PROHIBIT ENTRANCE WITH WEAPON. Filipovic reports, “Christiane Amanpour has little patience for theoretical musings about the state of journalism or feminism, and even less for armchair critics who haven’t done the work or taken the risks. More than once she engaged with a question of mine before rejecting it, but even in her dismissals she was thorough and illuminating. Just sitting in her office—lined with trophies, a framed picture of her son atop her crowded desk—you can imagine she would remain collected and steely even when bullets are flying. You walk away holding her in tremendous esteem and, not that she’d give a damn, liking her a lot—even when she calls you out on the first sentence of your interview.”

“Frankly, the press has been part of the problem by thinking that objectivity means neutrality or false equivalence.”

"There are hundreds of millions of women around the world who don’t dare imagine that they have a right just to be happy.”

“I’m pretty middle-of-the-road in most of my views except when it comes to genocide and climate truths.”

PLAYBOY: The president of the United States has called reporters scum and slime.

AMANPOUR: I cannot believe you started with the president of the United States.

PLAYBOY: Going for it, you know? He has targeted CNN in particular as a purveyor of fake news. Public trust in the media is at an all-time low in the United States. You’ve made a career out of telling some of the world’s most important stories. What do you make of this moment for press freedom and the role of journalism in society?

AMANPOUR: The president has been very clear from the beginning that the strategy is to delegitimize whoever he thinks is an opponent, whether it’s the press, a foreign leader, the chairman of the Federal Reserve—whoever seems to stand in his way. That’s his thing. Our job is to not accept that framing from anybody who seeks to delegitimize the free, independent, democratically protected press. I have a platform to bring the truth, to bring evidence, to bring stories, to bring what’s really happening in the world and in the United States to the audience. I think the rest of it is up to the audience. They now have responsibility.

PLAYBOY: But lots of viewers aren’t taking that on; many are simply seeking out publications and television shows that confirm their prior beliefs. Are viewers the ones who are abdicating their civic responsibility?

AMANPOUR: There are a lot of people who believe the conspiracy theories and the lies that are told about us or about what’s going on in the world. But I notice the backlash to all these lies and conspiracy theories, and I appreciate the fact that our ratings are up, readership is up, subscription is up for real truth-telling platforms. I’m not a Pollyanna. I don’t think we’re out of danger. I think, though, that those of us who have been doing this for a long time, who are experienced and know where the truth lies, have a responsibility to stand up for the truth—even in public, even if it’s unpopular.

PLAYBOY: You’ve risked your life for stories. Friends and colleagues of yours have given their lives to bring us the news. Just on a visceral human level, how does it feel when you hear the president of the United States call reporters slime?

AMANPOUR: I haven’t heard the word slime, but I’m hurt and obviously offended when I hear an absolutely vital pillar of democracy and civil society being trashed from within. But it also redoubles my commitment to fighting against it. I know firsthand the danger of living in a world where lies are portrayed as facts. For me, the difference between truth and lies is the difference between freedom and democracy and dictatorship. So I’m very troubled by this. But I’d still love to interview President Trump.

PLAYBOY: There’s a debate roiling the press right now about how to cover the president’s lies—or those of anyone who comes face-to-face with journalists and spreads absolute falsities. How much airtime do you give that?

AMANPOUR: You don’t. You counter it. The concept of fake news is not something Donald Trump invented. Others might have called it propaganda. Just in fairly recent history, the Soviet Union was a master of this. The Soviets, now the Russians—that’s their war by other means. That’s how they fight to keep dominance in their sphere. We’ve got plenty of experience, we in this free press, and we know how to counter it. We just have to do that without getting hysterical, overly despondent and overly emotional.

PLAYBOY: The New Yorker and Errol Morris both got in hot water for interviewing or planning to interview Steve Bannon. The argument was essentially that he’s a propagandist, not someone whose voice should be amplified, which exemplified the idea of de-platforming. Is there anyone you would never interview or have on your show?

AMANPOUR: Right now I refuse to have climate deniers on my show. I will not have people who deny scientific evidence. I’m very much wedded to the concept of fact-based, evidence-based empirical truth. People who say it doesn’t exist are just equivocating and are relativists. Frankly, the press has been part of the problem by thinking that objectivity means neutrality or false equivalence. It no more means that when we’re discussing climate and science than it does when we’re talking about genocide and ethnic cleansing. When you pretend you’re being objective by equating unequal facts and unequal moralities, you’re not telling the truth. You’re telling lies. In the worst case, you’re an accomplice to the worst results of that.

PLAYBOY: But how do you navigate moral outrage in a place where you don’t know the culture very well, where you’re an outsider?

AMANPOUR: I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant, but I’ve grown up all over the world. I’ve traveled all over the world. I grew up in a patriarchal society with a Muslim father and a Catholic mother—an Iranian father, a British mother. I was taught from a very young age about the morals we learn first and foremost through our religious upbringing, whether it’s Christian, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. Thou shall not kill. Respect your father and your mother. Thou shall not lie. All those things we grow up with form the basis of a moral platform. It’s true that I don’t know the ins and outs of every single culture, but I’ve learned a lot over the 30 years I’ve traveled the world examining people’s cultures. I learn as I go. But I don’t consider my reporting to be some kind of moral diatribe; I look to the humanity of every situation. I see people in every story I cover, people with lives and loves and stories to tell who aren’t just statistics in war or famine or whatever political crisis they might be caught up in.

“I have no time for this conversation about whether we should or shouldn’t be there.”

PLAYBOY: Have you ever felt that the push to find truth in a complicated situation and not be focused on neutrality has taken you away from your obligations as a reporter?

AMANPOUR: Never. I challenge anybody to produce any piece of my reporting they think fits that description. Never. Which is not to say I got everything right all the time. One of the things I like about going places and spending a long time there is that the story comes into focus ever more sharply. I’ve never presumed to be an expert from day one on the ground. I’ve always said that the first stories you see will inevitably be pretty simple. The longer you’re there, the more the layers will manifest themselves.

PLAYBOY: One criticism of foreign correspondence as a field is that it’s neocolonial: Foreign correspondents go in, extract news from poorer countries and run stories that are simplistic or sensational or that simply portray other cultures as backward and in need of saving. Is there a diversity problem in international reporting?

AMANPOUR: Do I think there should be more diversity? One hundred percent. Do I think there should be more gender equity? Do I think there should be diversity in every level of news coverage, and in every level of global society? Yes, I absolutely do. But do I apologize? Certainly not. If we didn’t do it, who would? The typical complaint comes from armchair warriors sitting at home in their pajamas, tweeting, instagramming and facebooking from 10,000 miles away. Tell me, which is worse? That’s a whole lot worse than those of us who get up and go there and find the stories.

PLAYBOY: I think there are two arguments. One would be that it’s unbalanced: How many Africans are in the White House press corps? The other is that publications like The New York Times and networks like CNN should be relying more on local journalists to cover their own nations.

AMANPOUR: I think this criticism is crap, if you want my honest opinion. As I said, what is the other option? Furthermore, things are changing, and I think that criticism is out-of-date. I think my profession was instrumental in turning around the West’s indifference to Bosnia and then to Kosovo. We helped spur our democracies to intervene, to stop a genocidal slaughter in Europe and therefore save their own dignities and standings as well as lives on the ground. That’s a good thing. We did that, and I’m proud of it. We might have had that impact had we been en masse in Syria, but we weren’t, because ISIS was beheading people, starting with poor James Foley. And so we were not able to go there. Who did we rely on? Syrians, Syrian journalists. They told the story of their war.

PLAYBOY: At great personal risk.

AMANPOUR: At great personal risk and with great professionalism. I ask myself, what would Obama have done if the same press corps that was in Bosnia in the 1990s had been in Syria, telling the same human stories day after day and making it impossible for our democracies to turn their heads in the face of wanton slaughter and wholesale violation of all the values and policies the West says it not only upholds but seeks to promote around the world? It’s a terrible realization that we failed in Syria. The Syrian journalists did a great job, but we failed. The Trump administration is now pulling out American forces, and ISIS is not defeated.

We failed in Rwanda. We didn’t go to Rwanda because, if I’m not mistaken, the African and the Western press were focused on the good-news story of Nelson Mandela’s election in South Africa, a fantastic story. They were focused on O.J. Simpson in the United States. And in three months, 800,000 to 1 million black people were slaughtered in Rwanda. That’s a huge burden to bear. What I’m saying is that I have no time for this conversation about whether we should or shouldn’t be there.

PLAYBOY: Speaking of things you might have no time for, you’re one of the most famous female journalists in the world. What are you sick of getting asked about being a woman in this field?

AMANPOUR: Oh, that’s interesting. What am I sick of getting asked? “What does it mean to be a woman in this field?” More and more women have joined this particular profession as foreign correspondents, in front of the camera, behind the camera, on shows and the like. That’s a huge change from when I started out in 1990. But until we have more women at the top of news organizations, there will still be an issue—not with how women are represented but how the world is represented.

Treating women equally is not just a human right or a charity. If women as well as men in our work were determining what stories were going to be covered so there wasn’t such a massive imbalance, eventually you would get a different look at the world. Women have made a big difference in how we cover the world—and I think our male colleagues have learned from us—because in addition to covering the bang-bang and the hardware and all of that, our natural instinct is that everyone has a human story. The thing I’ve learned throughout my career, and I guess from my childhood, is that we’re all very similar. We all, wherever we come from, have the same hopes, the same dreams, the same desires. And we need to emphasize that more and more, because there’s a sense these days—especially with nationalism, populism and anti-immigration, whether it’s in the United States, parts of Europe or elsewhere—that somehow there is a group of people who are less than human, who are really scary, who would do us harm, who would, if we let them in, somehow destroy our countries. It’s not borne out by the facts, and it’s sad that today those thoughts and those politics are still being perpetrated. Too many political leaders are appealing to the fear factor rather than to the hope factor.

PLAYBOY: Give me an example: When have you covered a story differently?

AMANPOUR: In my coverage of the war in Bosnia I almost never went to the briefings at the beginning, and I didn’t do the politics. I remember telling stories of what it was like as an ordinary person to be caught in a medieval siege from 1992 all the way through the 1990s until the war was stopped. The first winter, I’ll never forget, professors, engineers, scientists, artists were cutting down trees for wood, burning their books for heat, picking grass and herbs from the central islands along Sniper Alley, just trying to survive.

“What am I sick of getting asked? “What does it mean to be a woman in this field?”

PLAYBOY: Your personal and professional lives have hinged on migration and movement. What perspective do you wish Americans had on the immigration debate? How could we be thinking about it differently?

AMANPOUR: First and foremost it is absolutely true that over many, many years the United States administrations and Congress have failed to implement a rational immigration-reform process, program or set of laws. They’ve just failed. What we’re seeing is a whole load of ad hoc policies that are made with a huge amount of short-termism that then affect real human beings. So I think one story that’s not told enough about the Southern border of the United States is the push factor: What is causing people to get up and take that very dangerous route by foot, many with their families, to come from Central America or wherever it might be to try to find refuge? The economic and environmental fallout there is not being told.

People wish to stay in their own countries if they can. That’s the one thing I’ve learned from traveling and covering war and refugees. It’s not as if everybody’s dying to suddenly leave their countries and come to the U.S. Most people who come are forced to by crime, war, famine, dictatorship or lack of freedom in their own countries. They would rather stay where they are. That’s why, to me, it would seem that the best foreign policy of a nation is not only to keep itself and its economy and standing in the world secure but also to do its utmost not to close its borders and hunker down; a nation needs to do what it can to make other parts of the world livable. I wish leaders could look a bit more broadly at what would really prevent a mass influx of people seeking basic safety and freedom and something to eat.

PLAYBOY: So I have this quote from you. In Sheila Weller’s book The News Sorority, you say, “All my energy, my emotion, my intellect went into my work. During the ’90s, people would ask me, ‘When are you going to settle down?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever have a child.’ ” And then you did. What changed?

AMANPOUR: What changed is that I felt I needed to humanize myself a little. Actually it was pretty funny. One of my producers, Robert Wiener, was instrumental in CNN’s coverage of Baghdad during the war. He once said to me, “So, Christiane, what are you going to do, snuggle up with all your awards? Don’t you think you need to get serious about your personal life?” I suddenly started to think about it, and I said, “Yeah, maybe I should focus a little bit more on my personal life and see what happens.” And I did. I started to make myself more open. I’d had great love affairs in the field, on the road, but I was absolutely committed to my career and to the stories. I could not have done what I did had I had the responsibility to stay alive and to keep leaving the field and going home. I couldn’t have done it, end of story. I didn’t really think about my own safety. You’re young, you think you’re immortal, you don’t necessarily have anybody to stay alive for. You’re balls to the wall. You’re doing the job and you’re loving it. So I was a late starter in that regard. I had my kid at 42, and it is literally the joy of my life. But I can tell you one thing: As soon as I had my child, I suddenly started to feel more nervous about going overseas, about going to war zones, about maybe succumbing, like so many of my friends and colleagues had done.

PLAYBOY: I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but why have a kid then?

AMANPOUR: Well, it’s a good question. To be honest, I didn’t necessarily think I had to have a kid, but I cannot imagine my life as rich as it has been since I’ve had my kid. Nothing in the world will match what my child means to me. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

But fast-forward now to these young kids. I had a 26-year-old young man on my show recently, a member of Extinction Rebellion, who, like many millennials, are asking themselves if they’re going to have children. Are they going to be able to bring children into this world we’ve created for them through our wanton short-termism and greed? That’s a whole different existential crisis than we had in my generation. Would I have a kid? Well, for me the question was could I still be a professional. Today the question is whether it’s moral to bring a child into this world. These are tough issues our young people are wrestling with.

PLAYBOY: Your show replaced Charlie Rose’s on PBS after he was sacked for sexual harassment. He’s just one of a long list of men whose behavior has gotten them removed from their positions as part of the #MeToo movement.

AMANPOUR: And all of them still deny it.

PLAYBOY: You told Variety that you don’t think the pendulum has swung too far. It’s a question everyone’s being asked: “Has #MeToo gone too far?” You said no. But you also said we can’t have a one-size-fits-all solution to these issues.

AMANPOUR: Correct, and those are not two opposing thoughts. Do I think it’s gone too far? The answer for me is categorically no. This movement has completely changed the dynamic of the world. It’s not perfect. It’s not that now every woman is safe or every woman has a clear path up in her career or every woman can get the truth out. That’s not the case. What it has done is shift in an irreversible way the expectations around what women have been forced to endure in silence. It has shifted entirely the notion of consent. I believe that in order to really change this, men have to be involved in the solutions. And I say that because I’m a feminist, because I’m the mother of a boy and I want my boy to grow up in a safe, consensual society, hand in hand with women, and because I believe this world will never get any better unless in every level of society men and women are on equal footing and working together.

“How much luckier can I get? Seriously, it’s not a rhetorical question.”

PLAYBOY: So outside of the most obvious criminal cases that should be dealt with by the justice system, what does a solution look like?

AMANPOUR: Obviously crimes have been committed. We should not have people protecting themselves by having their lawyers or lobbyists or whoever they are getting victims to sign nondisclosure agreements, forcing people to accept pittances as payoffs or payouts. We should hold the serious offenders accountable, 100 percent. But not every action is a criminal action. And not every action is the same. I think a huge amount of effort and accountability can be meted out without necessarily firing or destroying somebody’s life.

But much like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa or those kinds of post-conflict resolutions, it requires all sides—in this case all genders—to work together. It requires those whose wrongdoing is less than a criminal wrongdoing to fess up, to work with whoever they need to work with on whatever level to atone. Some people have perhaps been accused unfairly, and we need to be very aware of that, because we’re not going to have a solid foundation for this movement if it looks like it’s unfair and just a witch hunt.

PLAYBOY: One thing feminists emphasize about this movement is that, though we talk about sexual harassment, it’s really not about sex; it’s about power.

AMANPOUR: And sex.

PLAYBOY: And it’s about the ways in which sexually harassing women are more than just “it makes us feel bad.” It’s that it systematically pushes us out of opportunities and out of particular fields. So is part of the solution to replace the men who have done wrong with women?

AMANPOUR: Well, listen, you’re going to ask me because that’s my case. Charlie Rose does not accept these accusations. You have to put his perspective in it as well. But I can say only this: I am absolutely thrilled and I think it’s a great statement that a woman has taken this job at this particular time. I’m not just a token woman. I’m a woman who has risen through the ranks and hopefully proved my competence, my integrity and my lack of compromise on those issues. So I think it’s completely and utterly apt. The amount of feedback I’ve had from women absolutely confirms that for me. Actually, I don’t even think it should be a question. I think women have proved themselves over and over again, and the notion that we should be grateful for any tidbits or crumbs or pairing with anybody else is ancient history. What irritates me is that when people of privilege complain about, let’s say, a woman getting this job, they’re complaining about the field being level. That’s all. And that’s not acceptable. We have to have a level playing field now.

PLAYBOY: The #MeToo observation I’ve found most resonant comes from Rebecca Traister in New York magazine: “In hearing these individual tales, we’re not only learning about individual trespasses, but for the first time getting a view of the matrix in which we’ve all been living. We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories.” How do you think it changes the dynamic to have women like you now in a position of telling our political and cultural stories?

AMANPOUR: First and foremost, the ultimate contradiction to all of these accusations against Harvey Weinstein is that he’s been accused of some very serious criminal wrongdoing and misconduct against women, and yet he produced some great films. There’s no doubt about it; our cultural environment might have been poorer without those films. But the point you’re making is correct. If we accept that our society’s story will be told by only one gender, it’s not the whole story. That’s what we’re still struggling for. It will take decades, if not centuries, more. And whoever’s in a position of power, privilege and entitlement lets go of it with great difficulty. What they need to know is that most of us are not looking to overtake and dominate; we want to share in the telling of our personal and global narrative, or our historical narrative won’t be told accurately.

PLAYBOY: I don’t work in many conflict zones, but I do work in humanitarian crisis zones. One of the more jarring things for me is coming home from a crisis and having a nice bottle of wine and dinner in a beautiful restaurant. It so deeply highlights the random luck of being born in one place or another. How do you navigate that contrast, and does it ever get easier to be in the places you work and then come back to a beautiful home in London?

AMANPOUR: I remember very strongly the first times I came out of the siege of Sarajevo to take a break. I would come out for maybe a couple of weeks and then be there for several months and then come out again for a couple of weeks, et cetera. I remember deep feelings of guilt when I left. I thought it was just me, but now I know it’s very common. I don’t even think it’s post-traumatic stress disorder; it’s stress-of-the-moment disorder, when you leave whoever it is behind, in whatever nightmare scenario you’ve all been in together, and feel guilty for them, for their basic physical safety. You think you’re deserting the cause, so to speak. You’re deserting colleagues, friends, people, the story.

I’ve had those feelings and I’ve pushed the limits of getting people out of the siege of Sarajevo. I did things that I would have been in deep, deep trouble for had it been known at the time. I used every means possible to extract some very vulnerable people from Sarajevo. It wasn’t allowed, but I did it along with my team members, and I’m pleased and proud of that.

PLAYBOY: Whom did you extract?

AMANPOUR: I extracted a husband, wife and their kid and made up all sorts of stories as to why they had to be processed through the official lines, get on a military flight, get out, come to the United States, et cetera. I even said the kid worked for a kids’ program on CNN. It was only mildly stretching the truth. In any event, I saved their lives, we saved their lives, and I have nothing to apologize for. Again, what’s the alternative? Our oath, or mine, is do no harm. I don’t feel the necessity not to come home and have a glass of wine and see my friends and family. In fact, I believe that kept me sane and that I could, like many people, have been driven completely mad had I stayed there the entire time with no break. And then what good would I have been? What story would I have told? I would have been totally compromised. One of my proudest accomplishments is that I emerged sane from all these horrendous things I’ve seen.

PLAYBOY: Were there ever moments when you felt you’d crossed over, that you were at a point where you were mentally unwell?

AMANPOUR: Nope. Never. Certainly not at the time and not since, but I think it’s an important question, because there are degrees thereof. Some people are much more affected, some people less. Some people are obviously affected, some people hide it. I think mental health is an issue we absolutely have to talk about. And we are, more and more and more. I credit CNN and all the news organizations that very early on in the Bosnian war and certainly after 9/11 realized they were sending their employees into the worst, most extreme experiences of the human condition, and that it will have an effect.

There’s no doubt I’ve been affected. And I would say that sometimes I’m very stressed, sometimes I’m anxious, sometimes I can maybe talk loudly or whatever. I put it all down to the effects of what I went through. I’m not ashamed. I don’t have screaming PTSD, but I certainly have…I don’t know. I don’t even know how to describe it.

PLAYBOY: A normal human reaction?

AMANPOUR: It’s a normal human reaction, but you know what? It’s to an abnormal human experience. Not only what happens to us, but to watch what’s happening to the people we’re covering. It’s inhuman what we’ve had to witness. And that’s why I make no apologies for any of us who go and do it. You can be white, you can be rich, you can be poor, you can be any other color. But go and tell the stories and tell them honestly and bring back the information.

PLAYBOY: How did you not burn out?

AMANPOUR: I think because I came back enough, but also I obviously have a huge amount of stamina, mental and physical. I am a very optimistic person. I have faith. I was always in the warm embrace of my family and friends. And that’s what I would return to. I would come back to my family and friends and just try to have as normal and as beautiful a life as I could. I would go to museums, go to good films, go to lovely gardens with beautiful plantings. I would gravitate toward beauty, and it was an antidote. I knew early on—even if I didn’t know, I knew subconsciously—that I had to come back and do things that would cauterize the wounds.

PLAYBOY: You’ve been described many times as having nerves of steel, but there must be moments when you’re absolutely terrified.

AMANPOUR: Yeah.

PLAYBOY: What were some of those moments when you felt the most frightened, and how did you navigate that?

AMANPOUR: I’d never really been in a war zone before Bosnia. I mean, yes, there was the first Gulf war, but that was much more about big armies facing off against each other. It was much more of a set piece, though it was pretty scary when we were in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s whim. But to be in Bosnia in a medieval siege with indiscriminate shelling of civilians—and we were obviously among the civilians; we didn’t have a special journalistic safe haven somewhere—was very scary when I first encountered it. And then you just develop a certain awareness. I always touch wood and say I’m very lucky. Many of my friends and colleagues were not so lucky. You can’t allow those fears and those emotions in the moment to paralyze you. It’s only afterward that you realize what you’ve been through, perhaps the crazy risks you’ve taken. The whole way through the war, it wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid; it was that I managed the fear.

PLAYBOY: Are you a person of faith?

AMANPOUR: Yeah.

PLAYBOY: Can you tell me more about that?

AMANPOUR: Not really. I mean, it’s nothing huge. I was brought up Catholic by my mother, and I went to a Catholic convent. As I said at the beginning, that whole early childhood education formed my human and moral view of the world. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the basic golden rule, isn’t it, of Christianity? I’m not an extremist. I’m pretty middle-of-the-road in most of my views except when it comes to genocide and climate truths.

PLAYBOY: But you’re also a feminist, right?

AMANPOUR: Oh, I’m definitely a feminist, but that’s middle-of-the-road.

PLAYBOY: But the church is not exactly middle-of-the-road.

AMANPOUR: No, it’s not. So those are issues. When I have interviews with church leaders, for instance, I go very deep into that. I always bring up the issue of women in the Catholic Church

PLAYBOY: Is that a challenge personally? Not to do your job, but to reconcile your faith with some of what the church does?

AMANPOUR: No, no, no. Who I worry about offending is my mother, who watches. But for me, it’s an absolute nobrainer. I’m sorry my faith has so much to account for and to atone for, but you know what? All faiths do.

PLAYBOY: It sounds like you’re in a pretty fabulous professional place right now, but you told British Vogue that you’re thinking of putting yourself back out in the field again. “It’s time for my third act,” you said. In your dream universe, what’s the third act?

AMANPOUR: I don’t yet know what my third act is. I’m on the cusp certainly in my chronological life. I’m not sure how it’s going to manifest. What I do know is that I love being in the field, not necessarily under fire, but doing things like Sex & Love Around the World. I really enjoyed that, because even though it had that title, it wasn’t about the seedy underbelly of sex that I’ve done so much on as a reporter—the trafficking, the prostitution, the sex-selective abortions of female fetuses, the rape and all the horrible stuff. This was completely different. This was about love and intimacy and how different societies define it and how they experience it.

PLAYBOY: You mentioned your life as a young single foreign correspondent and the affairs, and that’s kind of the movie picture: In between firefights everybody’s having great romances and love affairs. How did being a young single woman in that field shape your views on sex and love and relationships?

AMANPOUR: I was free in those years. I was on the road. I didn’t have any constraints from family, and I was able to explore my emotional and physical desires. I know it’s a cliché: As one male colleague used to say, wheels up, rings off. Now, I wasn’t married, so there was no ring to take off, but I met fantastic people who had the same worldview. We were on the front lines together. We believed in the same struggle. We were proud of our work and thought we were doing something that made the world a better place. As I say, you’re on the extreme end of human experience in every way, even in your love affairs. It was great. And I’m still friends with a lot of them.

PLAYBOY: You don’t have to name names, but any you remember particularly fondly?

AMANPOUR: Very fondly. The person who was my main boyfriend for the longest time. Yeah, very fondly.

PLAYBOY: What did you take away from that relationship?

AMANPOUR: That it wouldn’t have lasted because we were both too focused on our careers.

PLAYBOY: In your personal life and now in your reporting on sex and that realm of human experience for your Sex & Love Around the World series, what might be informative or useful to, let’s say, a typical PLAYBOY reader, who’s probably a man? What does he need to know?

AMANPOUR: Okay, that’s interesting. I think he needs to know what I discovered reporting the Sex & Love series: not only the obvious, consent and all the rest of it, but that a man needs to be sensitive to what makes a woman tick; what it is that satisfies a woman emotionally, physically, sexually. I’ve noticed from a lot of the interviews I’ve done around this subject that the couples who feel the most heard are those who talk together the most and express their desires to each other. Communication came across as one of the most significant aspects of what makes relationships successful or not. That’s important for men to understand, because I think men traditionally are less communicative. Women have the reputation of always wanting to talk, but we do it because we want to break down barriers—our own barriers, but also the barriers that may be preventing couples from really getting to know each other.

PLAYBOY: Sex can be quite hard to talk about, even in very libertine societies.

AMANPOUR: Yes and no. I was so amazed by how open these girls and women were to me. I mean, when I asked this Afghan woman who was pregnant with her third child—she was probably no more than 20—I said to her, “Are you happy?” and the translator said, “Are you sure you want me to ask her that question?” She said in that society and in that milieu, it can be a subversive question. And that is perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the entire series for me, because it just summed up everything: There are hundreds of millions of women around the world who don’t dare imagine they have a right not just to be happy but to ask for happiness and love and care from their partners. That was an eye-opener to me.

PLAYBOY: The series, to me, was quite unexpected. I’m wondering if you learned anything in your reporting that feels resonant to this period in your life—your “sexy 60s.”

AMANPOUR: That’s a slogan I made up to make myself feel better. But in many ways there’s a freedom that comes with a certain age. I’m really lucky. I’m still gainfully employed, doing something incredibly satisfying on a really important network with a really great audience around the world and around the United States. How much luckier can I get? Seriously—it’s not a rhetorical question. I’ve received a lot, and I hope I’ve given back a lot. I hope it’s going to be sexy 60s. There’s a lot out there I don’t even know about that I want to explore.

And that’s what it is: I don’t have the answers for the first time. I’ve just figured it out while you’re talking to me. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what’s out there. And it’s a little scary, and it’s exciting. I think I’m on my last 30 good years and I want to make them great.

PLAYBOY: What’s that going to look like?

AMANPOUR: We’ll see.