Amanda Peet

Amanda Peet is an American actress, writer and producer whose career has spanned three decades, moving fluidly between studio comedies, prestige cable dramas, the Broadway stage and, more recently, the showrunner's chair. Born in New York City on January 11, 1972, she grew up in a household that mixed her father Charles's Quaker background with her mother Penny's Jewish heritage, an interfaith blend she has cited as formative in shaping her wry, questioning sensibility. Her father practiced law and her mother worked as a social worker, and the family relocated to London for four years when Amanda was seven before returning to Manhattan, where she attended the Friends Seminary, the Quaker school whose chapel would later host her own wedding.

Peet went on to Columbia University, where she studied American history and, almost incidentally, wandered into an acting class taught by the legendary teacher Uta Hagen. The encounter redirected her life. She continued studying privately with Hagen for four years after graduation, and that long apprenticeship gave her the technical grounding that has underpinned a career often miscategorised as glossy or lightweight. After early television guest spots and small film parts, including a debut in the 1995 drama Animal Room, she broke through at the turn of the millennium as Jill St. Claire, the perky, would-be hitwoman opposite Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry in The Whole Nine Yards in 2000. Roger Ebert singled out her performance as the film's secret weapon, and Hollywood took notice.

A run of busy years followed. She played opposite Jason Biggs and Jack Black in Saving Silverman in 2001, then deepened her dramatic profile with Changing Lanes, High Crimes and Burr Steers's cult favourite Igby Goes Down, all in 2002. Nancy Meyers cast her in Something's Gotta Give in 2003 as Jack Nicholson's daughter, a small role she made memorable, and the same year she anchored James Mangold's twisty thriller Identity opposite John Cusack and Ray Liotta. Woody Allen called next, casting her in Melinda and Melinda in 2004, and she appeared in Stephen Gaghan's Syriana in 2005. The decade also produced A Lot Like Love with Ashton Kutcher, the apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in 2009, Gulliver's Travels opposite Jack Black, and Chris and Paul Weitz's gentle ensemble The Way, Way Back in 2013, alongside Identity Thief the same year.

Television, however, increasingly became where Peet did her sharpest work. In 2006 Aaron Sorkin handed her the central role of Jordan McDeere, the new president of entertainment programming, in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Although the NBC drama lasted only a single season, her performance earned a Satellite Award nomination and announced her as someone who could carry Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue with both authority and lightness. She turned up in a recurring arc on The Good Wife as the warm, complicated military lawyer Laura Hellinger, an old law-school friend of Will Gardner whose romance with him formed one of the show's most affecting subplots. From 2015 to 2016 she co-starred as Tina Morris on the Duplass brothers' HBO comedy Togetherness, a melancholy two-season study of marriage and friendship that drew some of the warmest reviews of her career. Almost immediately afterwards she joined the IFC comedy Brockmire opposite Hank Azaria, playing Jules James, the chain-smoking, divorced owner of a Rust Belt minor-league baseball team; the role ran across the show's entire 2017 to 2020 lifespan and gave her one of her finest comic showcases. She also turned up in Matthew Weiner's anthology The Romanoffs in 2018, in the second season of Dirty John in 2020, and in 2023 stepped into the iconic role of Beth Gallagher, played in the 1987 film by Anne Archer, in Paramount+'s television reimagining of Fatal Attraction opposite Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan.

By the time Fatal Attraction premiered, Peet had already pivoted again, this time behind the camera. In 2021 she co-created, wrote and executive produced The Chair for Netflix, a half-hour campus dramedy starring Sandra Oh as the embattled new head of an English department at a fictional Ivy-adjacent college. Co-written with the academic and writer Annie Julia Wyman, the series was produced under the banner of her husband David Benioff and his partner D. B. Weiss, and it landed at number one on Netflix on its August 2021 debut. Although the streamer cancelled it after a single season in 2023, the show confirmed Peet's instinct as a writer for prickly, intelligent women and her willingness to dramatise the awkward politics of contemporary institutions.

Throughout her screen career Peet has kept returning to the stage. She made her off-Broadway debut while still studying with Hagen in a revival of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing!, then stepped into the Public Theater production of Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes in 2005, replacing Marisa Tomei on six days' notice. The following year she made her Broadway debut as the bright, restless newlywed Corie Bratter in the spring 2006 revival of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, the role originated by Elizabeth Ashley and made famous on screen by Jane Fonda. She has continued to take small theatrical projects between television commitments, often in pieces by writers such as LaBute and Theresa Rebeck.

Peet's personal life has been notably stable by industry standards. She and the novelist and screenwriter David Benioff, the Game of Thrones co-creator whose legal surname is Friedman, were introduced on a blind date by their mutual friend Peter Blake and married on September 30, 2006 at the Friends Seminary in Manhattan. They have three children, Frances, Molly and Henry, all of whom carry the Friedman surname, and divide their time between Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Peet has spoken candidly in interviews about how Benioff has encouraged her to be choosier about roles and about the pleasures and pressures of a two-writer household, a household that, in The Chair, finally produced work the couple made together.