Amanda Peet remembers trying to convince her parents that acting was a serious career.
The Your Friends & Neighbors star revisited her early career on the April 13 episode of SmartLess, speaking with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett about getting started in the business.
“I feel like they saw acting in the beginning similarly to just, ‘Oh, so you want to start modeling. You want to join the circus. You want to be a hooker,’” Peet said.
Her father was a corporate lawyer who had attended Yale and Harvard Law School, while her mother worked as a social worker and psychotherapist. Neither came from the entertainment industry.
A Skittles Commercial Was a Hard Sell at Home
Peet said she could do a scene in acting class and then struggle to reproduce it at an audition for a prestigious play. Commercials and soap operas put her at ease by comparison. She told the hosts that the material’s perceived status mattered more than whether she was performing onstage or on camera.
She recalled telling her parents that she had booked a Skittles commercial, only to be met with an unimpressed response: “I rest my case.”
Her Mother Found Her an Acting Class, but College Brought Rejection
Peet’s mother helped her find a teenage acting class at HB Studio when she was 13. At her small Quaker school, she performed in school productions and considered herself one of its better singers, a distinction she joked was easier to earn with so few classmates.
She arrived at college confident enough to keep auditioning, then failed to land a role in any of roughly 20 plays. She studied American history and recalled that her college did not have a drama program.
On a teacher’s recommendation, Peet auditioned to study with Uta Hagen while still in college. She described herself during those years as a “self-hating actor,” unable to fully admit that she wanted performing to become more than a hobby.
In an adult acting class, fellow students taught her about headshots, agents and the publications used to find work. She consulted the Ross Reports directory, crossed agents off her list and rode the subway to submit her photograph in person.
Getting an Agent Came With an Unexpected Appearance Note
After performing monologues in agents’ offices, Peet finally secured representation. She remembered an agent and a colleague walking with her to the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan while explaining what came next.
The agent pointed out the hair above her upper lip and asked what could be done about it, according to Page Six.
Peet laughed about the encounter and agreed that the agent had accurately identified a mustache. Asked how she handled it, she listed hair-removal cream, bleach and laser treatment among the methods she tried.
Making The Chair Let Her Show Up in Snow Pants
Peet later co-created Netflix’s The Chair with Annie Julia Wyman and served as its showrunner. Sandra Oh starred as the first woman of color to lead the English department at a fictional university.
In a separate interview with the Writers Guild‘s OnWriting podcast, Peet said the project began with her desire to write something for Jay Duplass, her Togetherness costar. She wrote about 55 pages of a movie about a widower before abandoning that version as the campus story developed.
She interviewed academics before assembling the writers’ room, then brought in a professor and other consultants to help with university hierarchies and the rules governing faculty discipline.
On SmartLess, Peet recalled another benefit of the job: while Oh and the other actresses arrived early to prepare for filming, she could turn up in snow pants without the same attention to her appearance and still run the production. She also enjoyed having “last cut, final cut.”