Amanda Peet Knows a Thing or Two About Losing It
The 'Your Friends and Neighbors" star on raising daughters, enduring menopause, facing mortality, and finding comedy in her own life and onscreen.
This story contains spoilers about the Your Friends and Neighbors season 2 finale, "The Night of the Hunter." In art and in life, midlife has a way of piling on. Amanda Peet would know. On this season of Your Friends and Neighbors, Peet’s Mel—the ex-wife of Jon Hamm’s friendly neighborhood cat burglar—was a woman on the verge (or possibly in the midst of) a nervous breakdown. Fuming at a teenage daughter who refuses to follow her parentally-preordained path to Princeton; spinning out over her neighbors, both human and animal, who treat the property line dividing their yards as a light suggestion; enduring the sweaty, rage-inducing indignities of menopause, fearing that her days of being a sexually-vibrant person are behind her: Mel is pushed to the limits, and beyond them, in every aspect of her life.
Onscreen, Amanda Peet is playing a divorcée going through menopause. Offscreen, she's been candid about caring for her aging parents while undergoing breast-cancer treatment.
Off-camera, as Peet recently documented in an essay for The New Yorker, she was diagnosed with (and underwent successful treatment for) breast cancer while her divorced parents were dying on opposite coasts. And with her husband of almost 20 years, David Benioff (of Game of Thrones showrunning fame), she’s a parent of three; her eldest daughter is about the same age as Mel’s daughter, Tori, and also just did the whole college-application rigamarole.
Ahead of the season 2 finale of the Apple TV series, Peet delves into it all, describing these trials in an endearingly matter-of-fact manner, whether delighting in her season of slapstick—including a particularly gross slip-and-slide experience with an overturned Port-a-Potty—or reflecting on aging, parenthood, and mortality.
Marie Claire: Tell me a bit about the creative process for Your Friends and Neighbors. How involved were you in what Mel's arc was going to be in this season?
Amanda Peet: Sometimes I beg [showrunner] Jonathan Tropper to give me a lot of pratfall or something like that, which he gave me. I really like a pratfall. I pitch him ideas, but he doesn't always take them.
MC: Was there anything in particular that you were really excited or nervous about?
AP: I'm excited, like most women my age, that menopause isn't a dirty word anymore and that we're seeing more of it on TV. And I thought it was great that Tropper made it funny, that she wasn't just this sexless couch potato.
Season 2 sees a newly-single and unemployed Mel Cooper (Peet) grappling with menopause symptoms, including a growing rage.
MC: There's this moment in the first episode this season when Mel says, "I just feel like I'm getting older, and he's just getting better and better looking." Does it feel vulnerable or scary at all, even as a character, to be expressing an insecurity like that?
AP: Well, I mean after the movie I just did, [Fantasy Life], somebody came up to me and was like, "I love your wrinkles." And I was like, "Oh my God, that's the takeaway?" I mostly just feel lucky that I have a job, honestly. But it doesn't feel like I've done my job if the takeaway for an audience member is that they were bowled over by the amount of wrinkles I have.
MC: Well, we are in such a bizarre cultural moment with cosmetic interventions. It's so distracting as a viewer when someone has had work done that obviously their character would not. Like I'm supposed to believe someone's broke, but they have a very expensive face? But because that has become so common in your line of work, it is noteworthy, but it's also just a relief, [to see a face that moves].
AP: I want to do my job, and I want people to pay attention to the story. And she was distracted by the fact that there weren't cosmetic interventions on my face. So I was like, Maybe I should get some of those done so that I can sink into the story and not have people be so distracted by the level of droopiness.
"I'm excited, like most women my age, that menopause isn't a dirty word anymore and that we're seeing more of it on TV," Peet says.
MC: I did see you say recently that you think about getting a facelift every other day. Did I catch you on an ‘on’ day?
AP: Every time I look in the mirror, it crosses my mind. Maybe not every time. Maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration. But you're facing mortality when you look in the mirror.
MC: In the show, you're in this very fraught mother-daughter dynamic. In your New Yorker essay, you talk about how you and your mom had this super intimate, open relationship. What do you remember about what you were like as a teenager? Were you ever a difficult teen?
AP: I had these sort of really feeble rebellions, because I think I didn't really go through a period where I was repelled by my mom. I was quite close with her in so many ways, so it was hard to do the fuck you thing to her without then being like, "Wait, I'm sorry I hurt you. I know that's a vulnerable spot for you." I started smoking, that kind of thing. [And] I gave her a hard time. I'm sure I wore really slinky clothes.
MC: That’s a classic! I loved to scandalize with a very short skirt.
AP: Yes. But my version of a short skirt is not the same as my daughter's version of a short skirt, just so you know. Our takes on feminism and which wave of feminism we're in can be exemplified in mini skirt length. I sometimes don't know what qualifies a skirt anymore.
Peet recalls of filming Mel's scenes with Tori, "I had just gone through the college process with my daughter the year before, so it was very natural for me to be having this conversation, not at this heated level."
MC: I'm curious what you make of how Mel handles her daughter's choices, which would test even the most chill, accepting parent. And Mel is not the world's most chill parent. Were you in Mel’s corner?
AP: I always feel like you have to get in the corner of the person you're playing. It wasn't that hard for me, for all the reasons you can probably imagine. I had just gone through the college process with my daughter the year before, so it was very natural for me to be having this conversation, not at this heated level.
MC: I don't know if this makes me insane, but I think [Mel’s] completely in the right with the neighbors. I really felt when she brought the dog shit to the neighbor's doorstep: This is a perfectly valid response to what's happening.
AP: That's hilarious. I do know that you can't be judgy about that character. You can't look down on your character. It becomes too hard to play, I think, especially if your character is in the midst of becoming a loose cannon.
MC: How much of Mel's behavior do you think was clinical? She’s going through menopause and one of the symptoms—I think in the show somebody describes it as “you'll feel the urge to murder people.” Is that all innate to who she is and maybe it's just that menopause is taking the breaks off of feelings or behaviors that were always there?
AP: This is the million dollar question. I wonder this with my own menopause and with some of my parents' dementia, and we as a culture definitely over-pathologize, over-medicate. So sometimes I think that these things are just the natural course. Then with Mel, to your point about the college thing, she’s definitely way too involved and doesn't seem to have any idea that she needs to have more of a life. Those people can be kind of dangerous because they don't know that they're angry and they're quick to erupt at the wrong problem, get upset over the wrong thing.
Coop (Jon Hamm) and Mel (Amanda Peet) try to have each other's backs as co-parents, though it doesn't always go smoothly.
MC: There’s so much wrapped up in how you perceive somebody in your own family, how you perceive your own kid—how hard it can be, it seems, to see them as clearly as other people do.
AP: Yes. I've had a lot of talks with my friend about this: She's much easier on her son and he's much easier on the daughter. You're overly identified with your same-gender child, and so it's easier to get overly invested in their journey.
MC: I think moms are harder on their daughters because moms know how hard it is to be a woman in the world, and so they're trying to prepare you for the world as it is. Whereas when you're the daughter, you're like: “I'm going to bend the world to my will.”
AP: In some ways, [as a mom], you're passing the baton and it's very hard not to be like, “Run your heat like this. That's how you succeed.”
You can't look down on your character. It becomes too hard to play, I think, especially if your character is in the midst of becoming a loose cannon.
MC: Are you a mom in the style that you imagined you would be?
AP: Sometimes. I'm getting there, but I had to build the bike while I rode the bike. I didn't think I would be this worried and alarmist. I thought I was going to be more... David will laugh so hard if he ever reads this, but I thought I was going to be more chill. And there's just nothing chill about me.
MC: Was your mom chill or was she just open? They’re related but, I do think, different qualities.
AP: I think she got more chill as she got happier. When she was able to get divorced and have the kind of work that she wanted and the kind of friends that she wanted. It took her a while to come out of those sort of 1950s social mores in which she grew up. She was such a good girl, and I think her spirit was more wild than it appeared to be. When she was able to let go and become more of who she was inside, she was more chill, because I think she was happier.
MC: Does it help you as an actor to be in a relationship with somebody who works in the same industry as you and understands what you do?
AP: I don't know if everybody who works in the same industry has what I think I have with David, which is just a very, we are very aligned—it's almost weird. Our tastes are very aligned. I don't want to sound un-feminist, but I do feel that he mentored me as a writer. I hope that doesn't sound un-feminist, but, I mean, he's brutal. But that's how I learned, is from him being so fucking brutal and hurting my feelings.
"I think putting [Mel] on a collision course with Coop might be very exciting because I think she's also in love with him," Peet says of her character, heading into season 3.
MC: What are you excited about, thinking ahead?
AP: I am really excited that Mel seems to be considering writing something. It seems like she's on a path possibly to do some kind of roman a clef or tell-all or something. I think putting her on a collision course with Coop might be very exciting because I think she's also in love with him.
MC: I don't want to be that person who's Parent-Trapping them, but it does feel like they like each other more maybe than they ever have in the duration of the show.
AP: I think that there's a lot there. I know [Tropper] can't get us together yet, but I just... The last scene when Mel’s with this agent who's like, "You got to write about what happened with Coop, with him being framed for murder and stuff," I thought that was very exciting. Because I think she has his number in a lot of ways.
MC: I'm glad that she was single long enough to get to hook up with Miguel. I just feel like that was important for her. And she manifested it by wearing a bra that matched her underwear, because that's not a thing you're just doing when you're not expecting someone to take your clothes off.
AP: That is correct. The last time I did that was probably my wedding night. And I don't even know if I did in my wedding. Did I? I don't remember.
MC: It depends on if you were wearing a wedding dress where you had to wear a bra or not.
AP: That's a really good point. And you know what? I think I didn't.
MC: Well, that's freedom. That's how you know it's true love, like good, I don't have to wear a bra with this fucking dress.
AP: Yeah! That is true love.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
