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Amanda Peet is shedding light on the often-illusory nature of Hollywood life.
The 54-year-old actress recently criticized the entertainment industry, describing it as nothing more than “smoke and mirrors.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Peet remarked in an interview with Fox News Digital, addressing the widespread belief that celebrities lead “perfect lives” in Tinseltown. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. There’s no real substance. You can apply any cliché to us, and it fits. It’s full of desperation. ‘What are they doing over there? Why don’t I have that? Why don’t I look like that?’ That’s the downside.”
She elaborated further, saying, “In Hollywood, it’s challenging — I know this might sound cliché. It’s incredibly competitive, and it’s tough to break free from that mindset where the prize seems so small, and yet so many are vying for it.”
The star of “Something’s Gotta Give” also opened up about the challenges of aging in a youth-focused industry.
“I’m older, so I have much more peace about it, but it’s really, really hard to find that, and it is hard not to want to chase your own buzz if you are lucky enough to have any, and instead, just be like, ‘What do I really want to do when my alarm goes off in the morning? What do I want to be doing? Is this really what I want to be doing? Is this really helpful or useful to anyone?’”
Peet is starring in the second season of Apple TV’s “Your Friends & Neighbors,” which premieres on Friday, April 3 with one new episode each week through June 5.
She said fans can expect a “lot more” from Season 2.
“Then also there’s the issue of Coop having this secret life,” Peet said of Jon Hamm’s character who plays her ex-husband on the show.
“And I think this season, one too many people are starting to get an inkling that something’s going on with Coop,” she continued. “And so it gets more and more dangerous for him to keep doing what he’s doing, which is incredibly exciting. And then [her character] Mel and Coop are still in this kind of like, will they, won’t they? They’re so p—ed off at each other, but they still seem to wanna f— each other. So yeah, it’s just really a whole big hot mess.”
Peet said she also appreciated a storyline where her character deals with going into menopause, which she said was cathartic for her.
“It was very cathartic to be able to put my own menopausal frustrations and rage into an appropriate situation, namely be acting out as a character instead of in my own life,” Peet revealed.
The actress has also been open about her breast cancer diagnosis, which she announced earlier this month.
She told Fox News Digital that when she first heard the news, her thoughts were filled with “terror.”
“My children and terror,” she admitted.
Peet said she made the decision to not tell her dying mother “because she wasn’t well for so long that it was, you know, fairly obvious that I, you know, on the off chance that she would have been able to understand, I wouldn’t have wanted to scare her.”
“So, it wasn’t a hard decision, it was just sort of hard in a more global way because I had been so close to her all my life.”
Peet revealed her breast cancer diagnosis in a New Yorker essay last Saturday, saying that she is stage I and doesn’t need chemotherapy, but will undergo a lumpectomy and radiation.