How Amanda Peet shook off her stage fright
PASADENA, CALIF.
The future didn’t look promising when Amanda Peet first thought she wanted to be an actress. While she’s gone on to impress in shows like “The Whole Nine Yards,” “The Good Wife” and “Brockmire,” which returns March 18 for its fourth and final season, she suffered from paralyzing stage fright.
When she attended Columbia University, she failed at every single audition.
“I’m not bitter about it,” she shrugs. “I think I was offered some kind of handmaiden type of role in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ but I swear to God that was it.”
A self-confessed “class clown,” Peet explains, “I did all the school plays in my tiny little Quaker school in Manhattan growing up. I was the star of a lot of those plays. But then when I got to Columbia, I think I was probably a little too cocky coming from that tiny little school.
“And no one would have me, which was good for me to go through that before being tossed out into the real world, where I got rejected every five seconds.”
Every five seconds for sure. She tagged a few commercials, managed some off-Broadway stuff, and was supporting herself by nannying and waitressing. But she was still incapacitated by stage fright.
“I was very scared, even if I was shooting a commercial,” says Peet. “I was usually trembling and couldn’t catch my breath. My experience of doing any tiny little thing was as if I was doing a movie with Robert De Niro or something like that.
“So I started just saying ‘yes’ to everything. Everything I got, I would just do it so I could try to feel less precious about it. After a while, it started working, and I started to feel a little more comfortable when I saw the camera, when I knew it was my turn for my coverage. I started to learn to breathe.”
She confided her fears to veteran actress Anne Meara (Ben Stiller’s mom). “She was smoking a cigarette and looked at me and said, ‘As soon as you want to be good, you’re dead!’ It was an important moment and I’ve held on to it.”
“There are different degrees of nervousness,” she says. “You can be paralyzed. I couldn’t stand it when people said to me, ‘That’s a good thing! That means you love it.’ No, I’m talking about paralysis or diarrhea — either way I can’t function.”
The 48-year-old admits she may have suffered from attention deficit disorder, too. “I think I did have ADD, but I’m sure I was not diagnosed,” she says.
“If you try to become an actor, it’s a pretty good fit for someone with ADD.
You can work in spurts. I think that’s a good thing for someone like me.”
Peet confides she’s sad that IFC’s “Brockmire,” which features Hank Azaria as an uncensored sports announcer, is ending.
“I guess I loved the fact that my character was a raging alcoholic, owner of a minor league baseball team, not interested in having children, pushing 50,” she says.