Amanda Peet’s parents were not impressed when she first said she wanted to be an actor.
“I feel like at first they thought acting was like, ‘Oh, do you want to start modeling or do you want to be a prostitute?'” she told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on Monday’s podcast “Smartless.”
Pete added that her parents were “as far removed from the entertainment industry as you could get”, explaining that her father was a corporate lawyer and her mother was a social worker and psychotherapist.
Pete said he also had severe stage fright when it came to “high-brow” things, but was “okay” when auditioning for “low-brow” roles, such as cosmetics commercials and soap operas.
“So I canceled what I wanted to show my parents,” she admitted. “I’d say, ‘I’m in a Skittles commercial,’ and they’d say, ‘I’m done with this.'”
Her parents relented somewhat, she said, as her mother helped her find acting classes when she turned 13.
Pete said he did all the school plays at his small high school and was one of the best singers there, but “that’s not saying anything.”
“And as soon as I got to college, I started. I went into all these auditions with some kind of confidence, but I never got one play. I auditioned for 20 plays. As if they had already decided, they already had their own clique.”
She called herself a “self-hating actor.”
“I couldn’t fully admit that I wanted to do this as more than just a hobby,” she said.
Pete said he was finally able to find an agent after taking adult acting classes with actor and teacher Uta Hagen.
And in the excitement of finally getting an agent, Pete said, the agent took her to a corner of the room and told her he had a mustache.
“She said, ‘Congratulations, we want to represent you,’ and she started telling me the story. And she said, ‘So, we just wanted to know, for you, you have a little beard, you have a mustache, a little bit here, and we’re trying to figure out what to do about it…what can we do about it?’ “And, well, I guess she was right.
Pete told his co-hosts that he had tried to remove the hair above his upper lip by any means necessary, including bleaching, waxing and hair removal creams.
“Whatever you want, I did it,” she admitted.
Pete landed his breakthrough role in The Whole Nine Yards in his late 20s, and went on to appear in films such as Something’s Gotta Give, Saving Silverman, Identity, Identity Thief, and currently stars in the Apple TV+ show Your Friends & Neighbors.
She also said she finds great joy in working behind the camera.
“After I started writing a little bit, when I was filming ‘The Chair,’ when I was behind the camera and women like Sandra Oh had to arrive earlier, when I was able to roll into my snow pants with my mustache and my hair and still be the boss, I thought, ‘This is great. What have I ever been doing?'” she said on the Netflix show she co-produced about a college English department chair. “And it’s really fun to have the last cut, the final cut.”
The 54-year-old actress also opened up about the breast cancer diagnosis she received last fall while her parents were in hospice care. Her father, Charles, passed away at the end of 2025, and her mother, Penny, passed away in January 2026.
“And I was very lucky. I’m fine, I had the radiation treatment,” she explained, adding that last month’s New Yorker op-ed was her first public account of her illness. She added that she and her husband did not tell their children right away because they were waiting to find out the severity of the illness.
“I didn’t want to tell my kids for a while until I knew if I was going to have chemotherapy and what the treatment plan was going to be, so I didn’t tell them and I wanted to keep it a secret,” she added.
