Days away from delivering her second child, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie reflects on work, life and motherhood.
As part of Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Power 100 issue, THR’s Marisa Guthrie spent the last several months trailing the Today show anchor. Guthrie’s path to the Today show started like many of her predecessors, in local news, but then took a detour to law school, then to CourtTV’s Washington bureau, beforerising through the NBC News ranks starting at the White House.
Guthrie’s personal life also suffered while she was working the White House beat. She divorced her first husband, BBC News presenter Mark Orchard, then began dating Michael Feldman, a political consultant who worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. They married in March 2014, four months after they found out Guthrie was pregnant. She was 42. When I ask if she delayed having children for her career, she laughs. “I didn’t have my act together,” she says. “I was doing the best I could in my personal life, and my professional life was going better. So you know, you just keep doing the thing that works.”
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“One of the things I really do love about Savannah is she’s game. She’s up for the question, and damn it, give me an answer,” says NBC News chairman Andy Lack. “I admire that about her. She’s got a very good bullshit barometer.”
“This job is so personal for everybody. It’s not a normal, ‘I’m going to go read five minutes of news and wrap it up,'” Guthrie says. “It calls for every part of you.”