Amanda Peet Hadn’t Starred in a Movie for a Decade — Until a Fellow Actor Wrote Her an Irresistible Role

Editor’s note: The following interview was first published on March 7, 2025 as part of our 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival coverage. Greenwich Entertainment will release the film in theaters of Friday, March 27.

Talk about life imitating art, imitating life. About a month ago, Amanda Peet told IndieWire during a recent interview, something funny and mortifying happened to her at the grocery store in front of her two teenage daughters. Someone recognized the actress. Well, sort of. They said hello, and complimented her on her work. And then it became clear that this person “recognized” her as Lake Bell, and complimented her on Lake Bell’s work.

This has happened before. It’s happened enough, in fact, that Peet encouraged her “Fantasy Life” filmmaker and co-star Matthew Shear to include it in his feature directorial debut, in which Peet plays an actress who, yup, often gets mistaken for Lake Bell. It’s funny, and it’s a little sad, and it’s incredibly honest, and it speaks to the spirit in which Shear, a Noah Baumbach regular and former star of the series “The Alienist,” set out to write (and then also star in and direct) his first film.

The film doesn’t just mark Shear’s first turn behind the camera but also Peet’s first film role in nearly a decade. (Reminded of this factoid, Peet was shocked: “Wait, is that true? That’s so depressing. OK, I’m going to have to recover from that, from those thoughts.”) The actress has spent much of the past 10 years working in television, including lead roles in “Fatal Attraction,” “Dirty John,” and “Togetherness.” Incidentally, it was Shear’s own television work on “The Alienist” that pushed him to write what would become “Fantasy Life.”

In the film, Shear stars as Sam, a once-promising law student whose anxiety has slowly chipped away at his confidence in all areas of his life. When we first meet him, he’s being laid off from his paralegal job, which sets off a series of panic attacks for this sweet if deeply lost New Yorker. Sam eventually secures a gig babysitting his therapist’s (Judd Hirsch) three granddaughters, which in turn thrusts him into the world of their parents, including Alessandro Nivola as their would-be rockstar dad David and Peet as their former movie star mom Dianne.

Shear told IndieWire he’s long admired the craft of filmmaking — “I always thought directing was cooler” — but once he started acting professionally, that was his primary focus. Yet, during the protracted break between the first two seasons of “The Alienist” (Season 1 shot in 2017, while Season 2 didn’t get into production until 2020), Shear felt himself “in a bit of a rut.” When he decided to write his way out of it, it only seemed natural that his own anxieties about his career would take center stage.

“I had an idea for a movie to write, and I just put the creative energy into that, and suddenly, I was doing it,” Shear said. “There was a core experience that I think a lot of actors go through, the very common experience of being in this languishing place between jobs. I was between two seasons of a show when I started writing it, and it took two years for the show to get picked up again. I didn’t know if I was going to have that job, and that income, and so on, so that definitely informed the character. The female embodiment of it was a creative challenge that I really enjoyed, and it gave me an opportunity to empathize with an actor that has it harder than me. Female actors in their fifties, they may have had this amazing dynamic career, but then suddenly, it’s like the roles are just not there for them.”

When he was writing the script, Shear said, he wasn’t picturing any actors (he wasn’t even initially picturing himself as Sam; he said his own wife had to push him to recognize how obvious that piece of casting was). He didn’t even always expect to direct the film, initially picturing a “King of Staten Island”-type arrangement, in which another director would take on directing duties.

Producer Charlie Alderman eventually swayed him. “He just, very straightforward, was like, ‘If you want to direct this, you’ve got to direct this,’” Shear recalled. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘I’m going to direct this!’ Once I was given permission to say, ‘I am going to direct this,’ it was like a maniacal amount of confidence came to me. I was like, ‘I must direct this!’ That was, in a way, useful.”

On the set of ‘Fantasy Life’Mika Lungulov-Klotz

That confidence might have helped spur Shear into going to Peet quite early in the casting process. While Shear didn’t say the entire thing hinged on getting Peet, it’s clear: they really wanted her for this part. “Me and my producers and my casting director Doug Abel, we all just felt that she was so right for it,” he said. “And it was a moment of enormous tension to see what would happen. She got back to us very quickly, like we sent it on a Friday and we heard back on Monday, and she was intrigued.”

(When this story was recounted to Peet, she burst out laughing. “OK, this whole interview is making me sound really pathetic!” she joked.)

“I felt like Matthew’s writing was special,” she said. “He’s really funny, and I could really relate to the part, since it’s about an aging actress whose career has fizzled out and who’s trying to keep one foot in the business and navigate having kids. … I just look for good writing. That’s all it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a successful actress, a person down on their luck, a heroin addict, a Ivy League graduate, Ivy League professor, a doctor, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. If the writing’s good, that’s the thing that you’re looking for.”

Peet said she tends to read about 10 pages of a script before making any choices. And when she’s read — and liked — an entire script, she has a “weird imaginary test” she likes to run with her “BFF Sarah Paulson.” “What we do is we pretend to be the alarm going off at, like, 4:50 a.m., time to go to work. She goes, ‘OK, it’s 4:50,’ and bzzzzzz,” Peet said. “Usually, there’s an immediately clear answer. ‘Do you want to play this part? Do you want to be there?’” (She added with a laugh, “The other person has to play the part of the alarm for it to really be effective.”)

Shear’s script more than passed the 10-page test. While the film is widely about anxiety — Sam has more than one panic attack in the film, and we soon learn more about other past experiences, while Dianne is open about her mental health struggles — it’s also often specifically about the anxiety surrounding actors as they ride the waves of a tumultuous professional path.

“He really was astute about what it feels like and that kind of middle-aged ennui and coming up with a funny take on that and a take on mental illness that isn’t incredibly depressing,” Peet said.

Shear was eager for Peet’s take on the material and how her own experiences might help shape Dianne. “She just brought this very honest, very sardonic perspective on this character and started giving me details from her life, things that I could have never come up with, that we collaborated on and became a part of the script,” he said. “She was this essential catalyst, both in terms of getting the movie off the ground and then further developing the script.”

The Lake Bell scenario is just one example. “I think, for Amanda, it was this quintessential experience, as someone who is in the kind of zeitgeist to a certain degree and people recognize her, but if you’re not aware of the specific things that she’s doing, if you’re not watching ‘Fatal Attraction,’ maybe she’s not recognizable immediately,” he said. “And that sucks in terms of your own confidence and getting through those periods where [your career is] not as active for whatever reason. … For an actor, you hear it almost with existential doom: ‘You don’t know me at all. No one knows me, I guess.’”

When the Lake Bell scene appears in the film, its specificity shines through. So does Peet’s performance inside the sequence, which is humiliating and funny and oh-so-real, as a giddy fan approaches her Dianne (plus Sam, plus her kids, plus Bob Balaban as her dad) at a Martha’s Vineyard restaurant to gush over her work in … “Bless This Mess,” a Lake Bell-starring sitcom.

“I’ve been mistaken for Lake Bell a lot, so he put that in,” Peet said. “I’m really excited when I’m mistaken for Lake Bell because she’s younger than I am and, obviously, extremely attractive and funny. At some point, I’m going to be really tempted to be like, ‘Yes, yes, I am Lake Bell,’ and forge her signature like a real creep.”

So, about last month in the grocery store. Peet laughed. “It was embarrassing because I’m dying to be seen as famous in front of my teen girls, and it just never happens,” she said. “It just really doesn’t register [to them] that I have a job. It is always in the past tense. ‘What was it like?’ The most attention I ever got from them was when they were really young, and there was a ‘Togetherness’ poster on a building on Sunset Blvd., and I was wearing a bikini top and a sarong, and Frankie turned to me abruptly and was like, ‘Oh, my God. What happened, Mommy?’ as if it had been taken without my knowledge and put up there as a way to humiliate me.”

On the set of ‘Fantasy Life’Mika Lungulov-Klotz

That Shear would prove especially adept at surrounding himself and Peet with other compelling actors and precise performances might feel like a bit of a given, considering his background. Both Shear and Peet are still gushy over their co-stars, including Nivola, who takes a role that feels “douche-coded” and instead finds incredible humor and heart.

“I definitely wrote David with that sort of yuppie dad who’s sort of in denial about his family life but is still functioning in it in a way that’s kind of touching,” Shear said. “We have this guy who’s douche-y, and his head is always somewhere else, but he’s home with his kids a lot, and he seems to have a very close, playful relationship with them. He’s supportive of his wife. When Alessandro came on, he was so amused by this character and was almost giddy about making him as embarrassing as possible, which, in Alessandro’s craft, is not at all broad and is not gimmicky.”

Nivola, who was heading to the Oscars to celebrate Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” when we were lining up time to talk, happily emailed over a batch of deep-feeling answers to our queries about this special character. “David is suffering. His dreams of rock stardom didn’t come true, and he hasn’t had an outlet for his musical talent for many years,” Nivola wrote. “That feeling of unmet expectations and mid-life disappointment is universally kind of heartbreaking even in the guise of someone comically un-self-aware. … Despite all of the embarrassing self-obsession that comes with a mid-life crisis, he really loves his wife and his children, and that is endearing.”

Mostly, Peet was taken by the humor Nivola injects into her character’s husband, something she sees as only really possible with Nivola. “I think [Alessandro] is so underrated as a comic actor. I’ve known him since I was in my twenties in New York,” Peet said. “We actually dated briefly, and we’ve been trying to work together for a really long time. He’s very, very funny as a person and also very, very smart. I think his take is just so special. He lives in Brooklyn, so he had such a specific idea of this brand of douchey-ness. No offense to any people in Brooklyn!”

Nivola was just as pumped to work with Peet, and credits her for finally making it possible. Per his enthusiastic email: “I’ve known Amanda for about as long as anyone in Hollywood. We were palling around New York in the mid-’90s when we had just gotten out of college. In all that time, no one ever asked us to be in anything together. I guess she had some say in the matter this time, so when she called up and asked me, there was only one reasonable response: ‘IT’S ABOUT F-ING TIME!'”

The rest of the cast is stacked with beloved big names seemingly designed to charm New York theater nerds: not just Hirsch and Balaban, but also Holland Taylor, Jessica Harper, and Andrea Martin. Having another actor behind the camera seemed to appeal to everyone. “Actors usually make good directors,” Nivola wrote. “They prioritize performance over everything else, whereas directors who have not been actors care more about their shots. You need both (and more) to make a good film. But starting with performance and building the visual storytelling around it guarantees life, and for me, no matter how beautiful or stylish a film is, if the people in it lack spontaneity, then the whole exercise is wasted.”

‘Fantasy Life’

One of the best scenes in the film arrives in its last act, when nearly everyone is together around the dinner table at Balaban and Harper’s married characters’ family home. Peet and Nivola are there, so are Hirsch and Martin, while Shear lingers in the kitchen. It’s easy to see why this would delight Peet, who previously created and wrote the Sandra Oh-starring Netflix series “The Chair” alongside Annie Julia Wyman, and admits she’s “very, very anxious” to do behind-the-camera work again.

“Obviously, I am obsessed with actors,” Peet said. “I love collaborating and riffing with people. I love the improvisational nature of it and the family nature of it. I like the feeling of being part of a company, because I’m old enough where most of the things I do now don’t have a toxic vibe. In the old days, it was harder, because you were dealing with a lot of feelings you didn’t understand, and people with their egos that you didn’t understand, and took things personally that you shouldn’t have taken personally, and didn’t know when something toxic was brewing.”

As the family chatters about Sam, ramping up to some big revelations from Dianne, the company lets fly, different egos and personalities brushing up against each other, plenty of humor zipping around. And then Balaban, as only Bob Balaban could, blithely wonders aloud about Sam’s sexual identity. “That moment, in particular, we just ran a bunch of times, just because it was killing everybody and we couldn’t stop,” Shear said. “We have, like, 30 versions of it, and this is the one that was the winner, so it is definitely a favorite.”

It’s a standout for Peet too, emblematic in its own way of her journey to this new chapter of her career. “I feel like I can’t put words to it that don’t sound corny,” Peet said. “I haven’t been in a movie in a decade and wham, I’m like, ‘I am at a table with Bob Balaban. I’m at a table with Bob Balaban. I’m at a table with Bob Balaban and I’m 53. I’m still doing this, and I’m doing it with the likes of Bob Balaban, and I’m 53!”

“Fantasy Life” premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival.