Amanda Peet opens up about her breast cancer diagnosis

Amanda Peet’s parents weren’t impressed when she first told them she wanted to be an actor.

“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,’” she told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the “Smartless” podcast on Monday.

Her parents were “as far from the entertainment business as you could possibly be,” Peet added, explaining that her father was a corporate lawyer and her mom was a social worker and psychotherapist.

Peet said that she also had terrible stage fright surrounding anything “high brow,” but when she’d audition for anything “low brow,” like a chapstick commercial or a soap opera, she could “kill it.”

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“And so then I was undoing what I wanted to portray to my parents,” she admitted. “I’d be like ‘I’m on a Skittles commercial,’ and they’d be like ‘I rest my case.’”

Her parents did relent somewhat, she said, with her mom helping her find an acting class when she turned 13.

“And so then I was undoing what I wanted to portray to my parents. I’d be like ‘I’m on a Skittles commercial,’ and they’d be like ‘I rest my case.’”

Peet said she did all the school plays at her tiny high school and was one of the best singers there, “which is saying nothing.”

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“And then as soon as I got to college, I started — I sort of walked in confidently to all these auditions, and I never got a single play. I auditioned for 20 plays. It was as if they had already decided, they already had their own clique.”

She called herself a “self-hating actor.”

“I couldn’t quite admit that I wanted to do this as more than a hobby,” she said.

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Once she got into an adult acting class with actor and teacher Uta Hagen, Peet said she finally was able to get an agent.

And amid the excitement of finally getting representation, Peet said the rep walked her over to a corner of the room and told her she had a mustache.  

“She was saying ‘Congratulations, we want to rep you,’ she started giving me the lay of the land. And then was like, ‘And we just wanted to know, so for your, you have a little bit of, you’ve got a mustache, a little bit here. We’re just wondering if…what can we do about that?’ ‘And boy, was she right.’”

Peet told the co-hosts that she tried to get rid of the hair above her upper lip by any means necessary, including bleaching, waxing and hair removal cream.

“You f—ing name it, I did it,” she admitted.

Peet got her breakthrough role in “The Whole Nine Yards in her late 20s, and went on to star in movies like “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Saving Silverman,” “Identity,” “Identity Thief,” and she currently stars in the Apple TV+ show “Your Friends & Neighbors.”

She said she has also found a lot of joy in working behind the camera.

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“Once 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 earlier and I could roll in in my snowpants with my mustache and my hair and but still be the boss, I was like ‘This is f—ing great. What have I been doing this whole time?’” she said on the Netflix show she co-created about the chair of a college English department. “And it’s really fun to have last cut, final cut.”

The 54-year-old actress also discussed her breast cancer diagnosis that she received last fall while her parents were in hospice care. Her father Charles died in late 2025 and her mother Penny died in January 2026.

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“And I was very lucky. I’m clear, I did 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 hadn’t told their children right away as they waited to find out how serious it was.

“We didn’t want to tell the kids for a while until we knew whether I was going to do chemo and what the course of treatment was going to be, so I wanted to keep it a secret because I wasn’t even telling my children,” she added.