The Untold Truth Of Amanda Peet

Amanda Peet has been in the acting business for decades, lighting up movie screens, televisions, and stages with her thespian prowess and dazzling smile. She's also a regular on the late night show circuit, often swapping memorable stories with the biggest names in nighttime television.

While many people know Peet for her role in the big-budget disaster film 2012, or perhaps recognize her from the Ashton Kutcher romcom A Lot Like Love, Peet has a plethora of other credits to her name, according to IMDb. Notably she played Tina Morris in the HBO series Togetherness, and she later followed that with a riveting run as Betty Broderick in the USA true crime drama Dirty John. And she shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon!

But what else is there to know about Peet outside of her work in film and television? What's she like when the cameras stop rolling and the makeup comes off? And what is it that truly makes the actress tick? Read on to discover the untold truth of Amanda Peet.

While Amanda Peet is clearly a competent actress in any medium, it's not something that comes naturally to her or something that she's always comfortable with. The reason for that? Peet suffers from terrible stage fright, which is something she's had to learn to live with. "It's torture, just torture," she revealed in an interview with Cinema Blend. "When you wake up in the morning, your stomach already hurts." It's especially bad for Peet when she's doing a play, starting during the previews and continuing through the first two weeks of the run.

So bad is Peet's stage fright that when it's at its worst, she can't find a moment of respite. "It's like you don't even have a moment where you don't have butterflies," she continued. "It's like constant terror."

Despite the fact that Peet struggles with this crippling anxiety, she told Vanity Fair she'd love to be on stage again. Her love of acting must be really powerful if she's willing to deal with all of this!

Like many folks who shoot for a career in the acting business, Amanda Peet had to start at the bottom, and she wasn't exactly raking in the dough in the beginning. To that end, she had to work a second job in order to make sure that the bills got paid, just as many actors who came before her have. "I was a coffee presser at Bodum coffee shop," she recalled in an interview with Backstage. "I splattered and ruined a lot of shirts." That's not exactly the glamour that Hollywood hopefuls envision for themselves.

Additionally, when she was working to get her foot in the door, Peet said that her first headshots weren't very good, thanks to an abundance of unwanted hair. "It was the old days when they used to scratch it off, and you could tell — that's where they scratched off my sideburns," she continued. Maybe there's some hope for the rest of us, then!

You might not know it, but Amanda Peet is married to Game of Thrones writer and co-creator David Benioff, whom you might adore or despise depending on how you felt about that last season. 

To say Benioff has had a significant impact on Peet is an understatement, as she says he changed the way she approaches her profession. "I think meeting David had a bigger effect on my work than having children, because I started to feel more confident about passing on lousy writing," she explained to Elle. "I would read a script and say, 'I'm going to go do this,' and he'd say, 'You can't score in this role. You're not a part of the plot.'" Talk about some good advice!

Peet also said that she implored her husband to write a part for her in the hit series that he helped to create, but that never came to pass. Maybe next time, Amanda!

You might not know it just by looking at Amanda Peet, but, when she was younger, she definitely went through a phase or two. Part of that had to do with where she came of age, as the city shaped her hobbies and interests. "I grew up in New York and I went through a big 'Goth' phase wearing black," she shared in an interview with IndieLondon. "I definitely fancied myself to be a downtown hipster arty type of person."

Peet might have put the black lipstick and nail polish away, but she still has an interest in fashion and loves getting dressed up for the red carpet. "Being in this business, I think it is part of the glamour, getting dressed up and going to a premiere," she added. "It probably fulfills an adolescent fantasy." Hey, who wouldn't want to put on beautiful couture and makeup, and hobnob with the Hollywood elite?

You might have noticed that Amanda Peet is often spotted on the red carpet with actress Sarah Paulson, whom Peet calls her best friend. The pair met way back in the '90s on the set of sitcom Jack & Jill, and have been super tight ever since. "Within five minutes of meeting each other, we had our first laughing fit," Peet gushed in an interview with Elle. Clearly the chemistry was immediate!

Fast forward all these years later, and Peet and Paulson are still as tight as ever, showing that a long-term girlmance is indeed possible in Tinseltown. They even smooched in front of the cameras on the red carpet of the 2017 Golden Globe Awards, showing just how intimate their friendship is. "It's very intense and visceral and really beautiful and we work hard at it," she confessed to People. "[Paulson's] a little bit like my other husband or wife. She's like my wife." We are so here for this!

In addition to being an actress, as well as being married to a high-profile writer, Amanda Peet is also a writer herself. She's even put in the work to write a movie, something for which she has a bit of a strange ritual. "I write on the floor, crouched up in a weird ball," she told Vanity Fair. "I definitely think I'm a thrower of spaghetti against the wall." She added that her process is not unlike that of sculptors, who start with a large lump of clay and tease out the details from there.

For Peet, the most important part of the writing process is finishing a rough draft, as she says she can always go back and revise later. "It's what [actor and writer] Mark Duplass calls the diarrhea draft," she continued. "You have to just finish the diarrhea draft. Then you're good to go."

Peet's hard work has paid off, as Netflix ordered a show she wrote with husband David Benioff and D.B. Weiss entitled The Chair. In February 2020, Deadline reported that the series would star Killing Eve's Sandra Oh, and Peet would serve as showrunner and executive producer.

While having children might not have been the biggest influence on Amanda Peet's career, that doesn't mean it didn't have any impact on it at all. For example, scheduling is something that became very important to Peet once she had a family to tend to. "Well I have to look and see where something's shooting, and how long, and if there are a lot of night shoots," she explained in an interview with the Australian website Female. "Things like that all matter to me a lot now." It's not hard to see why, as it would be tough to raise children if you're out late every night, unable to tuck them into bed.

By the same token, Peet firmly believes in not only her work, but in the importance of her to be working outside of the home. "I think that while it would be nice to be rich enough or satisfied enough ... to just kind of be blessed out on motherhood," she said, "I'm just not one of those people."

Amanda Peet's marriage to David Benioff is definitely relationship goals. The two have been married since 2006, as noted by People, and they always look super cute when they're out in public together. Plus they also work together creatively, showing that they know how to get along just about anywhere.

But that doesn't mean their marriage is somehow special or different than any other, as Peet is the first to admit that staying together requires diligence and attention. "I personally do not believe in love at first sight," she revealed to IndieLondon. "I definitely believe in chemistry and lust at first sight. But I think love is something that takes work." 

That wasn't far from her mind when she was on the set of A Lot Like Love, a romcom that explored what love really means. "You can see in the movie that timing is important, timing is everything," she continued. "Both people have to be ready and open and I think that is what the movie is about."

Like millions of other people, Amanda Peet is a huge fan of Game of Thrones. She loved watching it while it was on television and was just as obsessed as everyone else with the dragon-accented drama. She even went to great lengths at times to make sure she wouldn't stumble across any spoilers, which had to be difficult when you live with the show's co-creator.

While that's not exactly breaking news — it seemed like everyone was hooked on that show for the longest time — what is interesting is that initially Peet didn't think the concept behind Game of Thrones had any real traction. "I thought it was a terrible idea. Terrible," she revealed on an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. "It's like Dungeons & Dragons but real, with real people." She added that she simply thought it was silly, which, to be fair, it could have very well been.

Of course, Peet was off on that assessment, as Game of Thrones was a huge success. Time even called it the "world's most popular show."

Amanda Peet definitely enjoys a pretty glamorous life. She gets invites to the most exclusive events, dazzles in fancy dresses on the red carpet, and has certainly enjoyed being in the middle of the pop culture zeitgeist. But if you rewind back to Peet's teenage years, she was actually a fairly ordinary girl, as she tells it. "I was actually a prude in high school," she told IndieLondon. "I did my homework and went to college and worked hard and was pretty normal." Chances are she wasn't out smoking with the rebellious kids then!

Interestingly enough, that clashes a bit with Peet's philosophy about how people act when they're tweens and teens. "The younger you are I think you are more likely to be concerned about having some kind of 'cool' persona, rather being who you are and just getting involved," she continued. Clearly she didn't care much about that, as she was busy getting good grades and not breaking curfew. 

Given that Amanda Peet has been in show business for decades, she's worked with a number of different directors, such as Stephen Gaghan, Howard Deutch, and Roland Emmerich. But that list would be incomplete without mention of brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, who co-created, co-directed, and co-wrote the HBO series Togetherness. on which Peet starred. 

It's no secret that Peet is a huge fan of the Duplass brothers, as she has plenty of praise for the creative pair, and she doles it out freely. "I love the way they work," she gushed in an interview with Elle. "They're brilliant writers. They're very loose on set. And I know that if I do something really bad, they won't use it, so I feel safe." That sounds like a dream team, for sure.

So enamored of the Duplass duo is Peet that she went as far as to say that they've spoiled her beyond repair. "They've ruined me," she continued. "But I'm happy to have been ruined by them."

Amanda Peet may be a happily married woman, but that doesn't mean she's somehow above having a celebrity crush. She particularly digs actor John Cusack, and, when she found out she'd be working with him in the 2003 film Identity, she nearly lost it. "I almost keeled over and fell down wherever I was," she revealed in a chat with Cinema Blend. "I was such a crazy, psycho fan of his that I couldn't even speak when I first met him." Peet added that it took her quite a long time to be normal around the actor, as she was so flustered by his presence that she couldn't look him in the eye.

Peet again co-starred in a movie with Cusack in 2009 — the disaster flick 2012 – and she certainly wouldn't mind working with him in a different genre of film. "Well, obviously my dream would be to do a romantic comedy with him because I would just love that," she continued. "But I'm just fine with what we've done so far."

Many actors in Hollywood are descended from other actors, like Kate Hudson and Dakota Johnson. But that's not the case for Amanda Peet, who comes from a family of doctors and scientists. "I remember when I got Seinfeld, I got Seinfeld before Jack & Jill and The Whole Nine Yards, which I consider to be my break, and [my mother] literally didn't know who Seinfeld was," she explained to Cinema Blend.

Fortunately, Peet's sister was more in touch with what was going on in popular culture, so she understood the significance of landing the part. "But yeah, there were no people in showbiz in my family in this generation or the next generation," she continued. "So yeah, I'm a little bit of a freak show."

Fortunately Peet has found success as an actress, so clearly it was the right decision to make.

Over the many seasons of Game of Thrones, Amanda Peet found herself getting very attached to Jon Snow, one of the main characters. So when rumors began to circulate that he would be offed on the show, Peet took matters into her own hands. "I had had many conversations with David [Benioff] where I basically said 'If you do that, I'm literally not going to be here the next day,'" she revealed on an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. "'Like, I will pack my bags and leave because I love Jon Snow!'" She also blamed her affection for the character on her husband, which is only fair given that he co-created the program.

Unfortunately for Peet, Jon Snow was stabbed to death only two weeks later. That's when she decided it was time to tell her husband how she felt. "You better find a way to bring him back," she continued. "I don't care what it takes!"

Jon Snow was indeed resurrected in the next season, and perhaps we have Amanda Peet to thank for that.