Amanda Peet
Amanda Peet is a prolific and award-winning writer, actress, and producer. She has spent her career telling stories about the complexities of life and loss, with a focus on everything from aging, death, and grief to motherhood, failure, mental illness, and the dynamics of race and gender in the workplace.
As an actress, her breakout role was in the comedy The Whole Nine Yards opposite Bruce Willis. Her other film credits include Igby Goes Down, Something's Gotta Give with Diane Keaton, Changing Lanes, Syriana, and Please Give, for which she won an Independent Spirit Award. Her work in television includes Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Togetherness, and, most recently, Your Friends & Neighbors. She made her Broadway debut in 2006 with a performance in Barefoot in the Park. Peet is widely recognized for bringing to the screen atypical characters, steeped in emotional nuance, deep vulnerability, and sly wit.
For her latest movie, Fantasy Life, she was awarded the Special Jury Prize for performance at the 2025 South by Southwest Film Festival. Her portrayal of a woman at a crossroads was lauded by critics as emotionally raw, fearless, and the performance of a lifetime.
Peet was also the co-creator, writer, executive producer, and showrunner the 2021 TV series The Chair, which The Atlantic called "Netflix's best drama in Years." Starring Sandra Oh, the show explored the intricacies of workplace politics in higher education. Her first play, The Commons of Pensacola, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner, had a successful and acclaimed run at Manhattan Theatre Club. Her 2018 follow up, Our Very Own Carlin McCullough, premiered in 2018 and was called “a brilliant human drama.”
This spring, she wrote a moving personal essay for The New Yorker, a brutally honest account of navigating the challenges of caring for her two dying parents on opposite coasts of the country amidst her own breast cancer diagnosis. The piece sparked conversations across the country about the benefits of reducing the stigma tied to cancer diagnoses and encouraging open conversations about anxiety, treatment, and grief.
Peet was born in New York. She received her BA from Columbia University in 1994. She received Columbia’s John Jay Award for “distinguished professional achievement” in 2026.