Playing a murderer scared Amanda Peet
But fans and critics are calling her ‘Dirty John’ performance the best of her career
“I was really scared to play a murderer,” says Amanda Peet. But the 48year-old actress came to embrace the psychological gymnastics required to take on one of the toughest roles of her career: Betty Broderick, the suburban housewife convicted of the 1989 murders of her ex-husband and his new wife.
“I was really scared to play someone who did that to their children’s father and to their children,” she adds, with the tone of someone still grappling with it. “And behaved in a way that is morally repellent. Yes, that definitely scared me.”
The fear resulted in a layered performance that fans and critics have called the best of Peet’s career. “Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story,” which also stars Christian Slater as Betty’s ex-husband Daniel Broderick, follows the seemingly ideal romance and marriage of the San Diego couple and their combative split, which preceded the brutal double murder that gripped national headlines.
Once again helmed by Alexandra Cunningham, the second season joins other recent dramas, such as “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Mrs. America,” in offering a complicated portrait of a woman whose identity is defined by her role as a wife and mother as well as societal expectations. The portrayal of Betty Broderick allowed Peet to confront and sink into the complexity of that archetype and find depth in a woman who had been reduced to tabloid fodder.
“From outside the situation, she was a murderer to me,” Peet says. “Once I was on the inside, she was a person in dire straits who had all her eggs in one basket, had no psychotherapeutic resources and had the rug pulled out from under her in the most fundamental, visceral way.”
The role had Peet thinking a lot about her mom, Penny, and the social mores she had to navigate as a woman who grew up in the 1950s and was starting a family in the 1970s while balancing a career. But it also had Peet reflecting on her own points of connection to Broderick.
“I’m a very jealous person,” she says. “I certainly care about airs, what people think ... not all the time, but I can relate. I’m not, like, immune to that. I can understand the feeling of wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to appear to be just flawlessly sane when things inside are not ... the discrepancy between the way things appear and the way things are.”
To prepare for the role, Peet opted not to review footage or read stories related to the case. She also didn’t read Bella Stumbo’s 1993 book “Until the Twelfth of Never: The Deadly Divorce of Dan & Betty Broderick,” which serves as the primary source material for the series.
Instead, she chose to let the scripts inform her.
After Peet was cast, Cunningham emailed one of their mutual friends, actor David Duchovny. Cunningham says the actor, unaware of the premise of the series, suggested the writer-producer find ways to tap into Peet’s comedic side.
“I actually did not realize the extent to which that was going to blow the character outward in so many ways,” Cunningham says, “because Betty was a very funny person. Even in super inappropriate times and, especially after she was in custody, she was still trying to make jokes and trying to make people laugh because it was so important for her that everyone like her. For Amanda, the humor and the rage were right next to each other all the time. And the intelligence. I just would watch her on set with my mouth open.”
For Peet, who has appeared in films such as “The Whole Nine Yards” and “Igby Goes Down” and in TV shows such as HBO’s “Togetherness” and IFC’s “Brockmire,” “Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story” put the spotlight directly on her. And she worked hard to earn its keep there.
“My entire life was Betty Broderick,” Peet says. “It was definitely all-encompassing. Not like in a Daniel Day-Lewis way — God bless him. I didn’t come home and make everyone call me Betty.”
But, as in most projects Peet takes on, she did have questions. She would often make the short trek to the home of her best friend, Sarah Paulson, and run scenes out loud with Paulson and her partner, Holland Taylor, to get their input and guidance on the emotional beats of her character. (Paulson points out that Peet returns the favor as a sounding board when she needs it.)
“It’s just a testament to her dedication that she would have worked an insane day and then still come over afterward to run the lines, or we would get on FaceTime and parse things out,” says Paulson.
Cunningham jokes that the questions would usually reach her only if Peet had already asked her husband, “Game of Thrones” writer David Benioff, and Paulson, and their answers were not in agreement.
“She always was like, ‘I don’t want to bother you,’ ” Cunningham says. “And I’m like, ‘You’re the only person that I want to bother me.’ But, so, she would say, ‘I asked David and he said X, and I asked Paulson and she said Y. What do you think?’ ... When I would see her name on the phone it would give me joy because we’re going to discuss what we’re doing together. And she’s gonna maybe give me insight into something, and I’m gonna help her. It really was like a dream that I never wanted to stop having. I think it comes from the writer in her.”
Peet wrote while a student at Columbia University, where she studied American history, but it wasn’t until she turned 40 and experienced Hollywood’s inhospitable attitude toward women of a certain age that she began to take writing more seriously.
Peet made her debut as a playwright in 2013 with “The Commons of Pensacola,” a Bernie Madoffinspired off-Broadway play. In 2018, she premiered her second play, “Our Very
Own Carlin McCullough.” Both productions received solid reviews from critics.
Her writing will next be seen on Netflix. She’ll make her debut as a TV series writer and showrunner with the upcoming sixepisode dramedy “The Chair,” about the head of a university’s English department. It’s unclear when production will begin on the series.
Despite her dedication to the page, Peet is convinced there’s one story she would have mishandled as a writer: Betty Broderick’s.
“I don’t think I would have been able to do it. The time period and the story. Also to write a real person. I couldn’t do it. I don’t mind saying that. It’s too hard.”