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Amanda Peet’s parents weren’t impressed when she first told them she wanted to be an actress.
“I feel like they saw acting early on like ‘Oh, so you want to start modeling or you want to be a hooker,'” she told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the “Smartless” podcast Monday.
His parents were “about as far from the entertainment business as you can be,” Peet added, explaining that his father was a corporate lawyer and his mother was a social worker and psychiatrist.
Peet said he had the worst stage fright around anything “high-brow,” but when he auditioned for anything “small,” like selling chapstick or a soap opera, he could “kill it.”
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Amanda Peet said her parents were not impressed with her desire to become an actress when she first told them. (Charles Sykes/Bravo via Getty Images)
“So I was putting off what I wanted to show my parents,” he admitted. “I’ll be like ‘I’m in the market for Skittles,’ and they might be like ‘I’m resting my case.’
His parents changed somewhat, he said, with his mother helping him get an acting class when he was 13.
“And so I was putting off what I wanted to show my parents. I’ll be like ‘I’m at the Skittles market,’ and they’ll be like ‘I’m resting my case.’
Peet said he did all the school plays at his junior high school and was one of the best singers there, “which means nothing.”
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“As soon as I got to college, I started – I confidently walked into all these auditions, and I never got a single play. I auditioned for 20 plays. It was like they had already decided, they had their team.”
He called himself a “self-hating actor.”
Amanda Peet with her mother, Penny, in 2012. (Photos by David Krieger/Bauer-Griffin/GC)
“I didn’t admit that I wanted to do this as more than just a hobby,” she said.
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After taking an adult acting class with actress and teacher Uta Hagen, Peet said she was finally able to land an agent.
And amid the excitement of finally getting representation, Peet said the lawyer took him to the corner of the room and told him he had a mustache.
“He was saying ‘Congratulations, we want to forgive you,’ and he started giving me the land. And then I said, ‘And we wanted to know, so, you have a little, you have a mustache, a little bit here. We’re just wondering … what can we do about that?’ ‘And boy, was he right.’
Peet told co-hosts that he tried to remove the hair on his upper lip by any means necessary, including waxing, waxing and hair removal cream.
“You name it, I did it,” he admitted.
Amanda Peet and Eunice Bae in “Your Friends and Neighbors” (Apple TV)
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Peet got his breakout role on “The Whole Nine Yards” in his early 20s, and went on to star in movies like “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Saving Silverman,” “Identity,” “Identity Thief,” and currently stars in the Apple TV+ show “Your Friends & Neighbors.”
He said he has found great joy in working behind the camera.
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“I started writing a little bit, when I was shooting ‘The Chair,’ which, you know, when I was behind the camera and all the ladies like Sandra Oh had to get there early and I could go in with my snow pants and my mustache and my hair and but being the boss, I was like ‘This is great. What have I been doing all this time?'” he said of the Netflix show. “And it’s really nice to make the final cut, the final cut.”
The 54-year-old actress also discussed her breast cancer diagnosis last fall while her parents were in the hospital. His father Charles died in late 2025 and his mother Penny died in January 2026.
Amanda Peet with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton at the screening of “Something’s Gotta Give” in 2004. (Tom Maelsa/DDP/AFP)
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“And I was very lucky. I’m clear, I did the radiation,” she explained, adding that her op-ed in the New Yorker last month was the first time she went public about her condition because she and her husband didn’t tell their children from the start as they were waiting to find out how serious it was.
“We didn’t want to tell the children for a while until we knew that I was going to do chemo and what the treatment would be, so I wanted to keep it a secret because I didn’t even tell my children,” he added.
