The Playboy Interviews: Icons & Iconoclasts
For generations of fans, the Playboy Interview was revered as the gold standard in American journalism. To read it in its totality is to glimpse a record of everyone who mattered in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries; kicking off a remarkable run of public inquisition that has featured just about every cultural titan of the past half century. Those figures include Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, Jean Paul Sartre, Salvador Dali, and countless others. It is a stunning list of heavyweight names that will never again be replicated. Now for the first time Audible listeners can hear those conversations as they happened. In the spirit of Frost/Nixon, interviews from the magazine have been rerecorded with key talent portraying some of the most iconic figures of the 20th century. Each episode offers a unique look into not just the individual portrayed but the time and place of the interview itself. In playing Betty Friedan, Rosanna Arquette showcases The Feminine Mystique author and mother of the modern women’s movement, in a famously confrontational interview from Playboy ’s 40th Anniversary Issue which took aim at the magazine for its leering objectification of women. Friedan is portrayed as a wounded hero, seemingly out of place as a new generation of feminists assail her politics on the eve of the 1992 Women’s March. Muhammad Ali, portrayed by Taye Diggs is shown in 1964, as a fledgling Heavyweight Champion, just months after defeating Sonny Liston. He is still searching for his voice underneath all the bombast. It’s a remarkable portrait of a larger-than-life figure shown with the utmost humanity. Michael Shannon plays the brilliant, anguished playwright, Tennessee Williams who famously sat for Playboy’s 1973 Interview. He delivers a treatise on the symbiosis between good and evil while opening his life to inquisition; di
