TV star Amanda Peet has revealed her parents’ less-than-pleased reaction to her dreams of becoming an actress.
Speaking with hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett on Monday’s episode of the SmartLess podcast, Peet shared her journey to becoming an actress and how she had to convince her family that her chosen career was a viable one.
“I feel like they saw acting in the beginning, similar to just ‘Oh, so you want to start modeling, or you want to be a hooker,’” Peet, 54, shared candidly.
The Your Friends & Neighbors actress said that her parents were “as far from the entertainment business as you could possibly be.” Her father was a corporate lawyer, and her mother was a psychotherapist and social worker.
Peet also shared that she initially felt terrified when auditioning for anything “high brow,” compared to roles considered to be “low brow.”
“Anything that was like considered more low-brow... I could kill it. And so then I was undoing what I wanted to portray to my parents. Because I’d be like, ‘Well, I’m on a Skittles commercial.’ And they’d be like, ‘I rest my case.’”
She related this experience to that of her own children, saying that when her kids “were offered to play in a higher soccer team and were like, ‘no.’”
“Because they were too nervous!” she explained. “So I gave them my f---ing anxiety,” she added, sighing.
Peet has gone on to become a recognizable face in entertainment, appearing in films such as The X-Files: I Want to Believe, 2012, and Identity Thief. She has also featured on prominent television shows, including Seinfeld, The Good Wife, and Dirty John. She currently stars opposite Jon Hamm in the critically acclaimed Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors, now in its second season.
Peet has been widely praised for her role in the Apple TV dramedy, with the Daily Beast’s Nick Schager touting it as a “career-best performance.”
“Peet is surprising, nuanced, and altogether magnetic, both on her own and opposite Hamm, with whom she shares intense chemistry,” reads the review of season one.
The actress has been candid about her relationship with her parents. In a heartfelt piece for The New Yorker last month, written as both a confession and a tribute, Peet shared that she was diagnosed with breast cancer while both her parents were dying in hospice care. Her father, Charles, died in 2025, and her mother, Penny, died in January of this year. Peet received a clear scan that month, free of cancer.
“I was extremely lucky,” she told the SmartLess hosts. She revealed that Bateman, a friend and former co-star of Peet’s, visited her mother in the hospital “many times.”
She also said that Hamm, her on-screen ex-husband, and Jonathan Tropper, the creator of Your Friends & Neighbors, “were really lovely” as she went through the process of caring for her parents.
“Tropper and Jon Hamm were very beautiful about my mom being in hospice and letting me go back and forth all the time,” she said. “Like I have very special bosses, I have to say.”
