By Naomi Pfefferman
In midlife, actress Amanda Peet, now 54, hadn’t starred in a feature film for a decade. She figured she was considered past her prime by Hollywood standards. “There’s always the assumption that you’re not current anymore,” she said during a recent Zoom interview. “You are irrelevant, you are wrinkly and you’re a has-been. I just didn’t get any films that I liked. There weren’t any movies that came my way that I thought I felt like doing.”
That changed when first-time feature film writer-director Matthew Shear penned a romantic comedy-drama with Peet eventually in mind as the female lead. In “Fantasy Life,” she plays Dianne Cohen, a Jewish actress with a languishing career, a rocky marriage and more than her share of neuroses. Like Peet, she hasn’t had a leading movie role in 10 years. “Am I too old?” she wonders.
Enter Sam Stein, portrayed by Shear, who’s just lost his paralegal job and suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and crippling panic attacks. In desperate need of a new job, the thirtysomething Sam goes to work as a “manny” (a male nanny) for Dianne and her three children. The unlikely duo forms a strong bond as they help each other battle their respective inner demons and navigate what will become the next act of their lives.
The movie co-stars Jewish actors such as Bob Balaban, Judd Hirsch and Zosia Mamet, which was part of the draw for Peet when she first read the script over a single weekend some years ago. “It was just that Jewish sensibility that I love,” said the actress, who grew up with a Jew ish mother and an atheist father in New York City.
When Sam asks Dianne if she thinks he’s a self-hating Jew, she reassured him that he’s just “an anxious Jew with mild OCD.”
Peet asked a Jewish reporter if that edgy scene made her uncomfortable (it didn’t). Throughout a wide-ranging conversation, the actress was alternately frank, gracious and hilarious – even a bit goofy – with a laugh that came breezily and often.
She may be in her 50s, but she’s not going in for plastic surgery any time soon. “I’m just someone who, for now has decided not to put stuff on my face or do stuff to my face,” she said. “So, for better or worse, what you see is what you get.”
Critics have praised Peet’s “Fantasy Life” turn as “luminous” and “the performance of a lifetime,” according to Variety. She was almost giddy while recounting how the movie won the audience award for narrative feature at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival (SXSW) and how she received the special jury award for performance. “Woo Hoo!” she said of the experience.
Winning the SXSW performance award came as a huge surprise for Peet. “Hah! Honestly, I never thought anything like that would ever happen,” she said.
“I’m 54 years old, and I’ve never won anything before,” she added. “So, to me, it was kind of like winning an Oscar… Maybe because of the kind of Jewish New Yorker sensibility of the film, that was particularly poignant to me.”
Her own Jewish background was something of a “mish-mosh,” but mostly secular, she said. Peet attended the Quaker-affiliated Friends Seminary, where in 2006 she married her husband, David Benioff – co-creator of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” – in a traditional Jewish ceremony. They went on to create a Jewish home for their three children.
“I married someone for whom having any kind of Christmas was uncomfortable, so we don’t have Christmas anymore,” she added. “We do Shabbat as much as possible, and we celebrate the holidays with family.”
Concerned that their children might feel left out as Jews during the Christmas season, Peet co-wrote a 2015 book, “Dear Santa, Love, Rachel Rosenstein,” about a Jewish girl who wonders why Santa skips her house every year.
Peet’s two daughters were bat mitzvahed, and her son, Henry, will soon celebrate his bar mitzvah.
Although Peet believes she has “a Jewish sense of humor and hope,” the character of Dianne is her first overtly Jewish role – she thinks. “I have dementia,” she quipped.
The actress attended Columbia University and snagged her breakout role in “The Whole Nine Yards” opposite Bruce Willis in 2000. Peet continued performing in films such as “Igby Goes Down” (2002), “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), and “Syriana” (2005).
Acting can be tricky, she said. As a New York actor friend once put it, she recalled, “It’s really hard to not suck.”
When the good movie roles stopped coming, Peet worked in television on shows like “Fatal Attraction,” “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “Togetherness,” created by the Duplass brothers. She is also a playwright as well as the co-creator of the Netflix comedy-drama “The Chair,” starring Sandra Oh.
Peet was focused on her TV work and raising her children when her agent chanced to send her the screenplay of “Fantasy Life” some years ago. “I felt very aligned with the character right away,” she recalled.
Once Peet signed on to the project, Shear incorporated a number of her experiences into the screenplay. For example, her recollection of feeling mortified when, in front of her daughters, a gushing fan seems to recognize her – only to reveal that she thought Peet was the actress Lake Bell. She felt like Matthew was “stalking my life,” she said.
During a separate Zoom interview from his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the affable, very funny Shear explained that he created “Fantasy Life” to write himself out of his own career slump in his 30s. The first-time director, 41, had spent years working as a “manny” while attempting to land acting gigs. “It was a time when I was pretty lost and dealing with some mental issues,” he said. His OCD was “on the depressive side of the spectrum, which has delighted me with panic attacks every so often.”
Shear grew up attending a Conservative synagogue in New York. He was practically raised on Mel Brooks films and used to traipse around his childhood home belting out “Springtime for Hitler” from Brooks’ iconic musical film, “The Producers.”
It was cathartic for him to write some of his own difficult experiences into “Fantasy Life,” he said.
Peet, for her part, was impressed by her character’s emotional depth. “You’re kind of at the tail end of middle age, and that usually brings on a lot of questions and a lot of reckoning,” she said.
The actress was also attracted to Shear’s depiction of the main characters’ neuroses and anxiety disorders. While films such as “Girl, Interrupted” may depict mental illness in a more extreme way, “Fantasy Life” focuses on highly functional people who struggle with such issues.
Shear was beyond thrilled when Peet signed on to the project, noting her ability to swing from “a very light, funny, even goofy sort of humor to a very subtle, sincere and sympathetic kind of performance.”
So, does the film represent something of a comeback for Peet? Will it change her career? The actress repeated several times that she has no clue. Meanwhile, she’s keeping busy. In April, she’ll begin shooting season three of the Apple TV+ series, “Your Friends & Neighbors,” in which she stars as Jon Hamm’s ex-wife. She’ll also do more writing. The movie “was an example of the very kind of J humor that I love,” she said. “Just neurotic to the extreme…a mind full of conflict.”
“Fantasy Life” will hit theaters in Los Angeles on April 3.