Growing up in New York City, Amanda Peet was an “unrepentant nerd.” The daughter of a shrink, she started psychoanalysis at the age of 14 and stayed in Manhattan for college in order to continue with her therapist. That desire to unravel emotional knots came in handy when the actress—a magnetic presence in Togetherness, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Whole Nine Yards who often found herself playing girlfriends and wives—began writing plays and TV scripts.
“Psychoanalysis is very much like literary analysis, like: What cocktail of events created this or that hurtful scenario?” Peet muses over Zoom. “I enjoyed the part of analysis that is essentially making up a story with somebody else. It’s not unlike a writers room.”
Peet finally has a writers room of her own for the new Netflix series The Chair, created with academic-screenwriter Annie Julia Wyman. One part charming romcom and one part wry campus satire, The Chair is a six-part dramedy about, well, unrepentant nerds. It stars Sandra Oh as Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman appointed to be head of a fictional university’s antiquated English department.
“I feel like someone handed me a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it explodes,” Ji-Yoon complains at one point. She is mostly surrounded by entrenched older white academics, played to the hilt by seasoned actors like Bob Balaban and Holland Taylor. They brag about their colonoscopies (“you could serve shrimp off my colon!”) and disdain contemporary teaching methods as practiced by young Black scholar Yaz (Nana Mensah), who has her students perform Hamilton-style musical numbers about Moby Dick and examines whether Melville was abusive to his wife.
Ji-Yoon wrangles with problems real-world academics will recognize all too well: declining enrollment, tightening budgets, gender and racial discrimination, politically sensitized students, and the increasing lure of celebrities. Meanwhile, she’s raising an adopted daughter and trying to be supportive of her best friend and object of romantic friction, Bill (Jay Duplass), a popular professor who’s become increasingly erratic since the recent death of his wife.
Curled up on her bed staring at the Zoom screen, Peet holds a glass of white wine that her nanny brought her. She is self-effacing and thoughtful as she discusses the insecurity that kept her from focusing on writing earlier in her life. Marrying novelist and Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff “changed everything for me,” she says. “The fact that he gave me the time of day—or I should say, he gave my writing the time of day.”
After making her playwriting debut with 2013’s The Commons of Pensacola (starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner), Peet co-wrote a children’s picture book with Andrea Troyer, who happens to be the wife of Thrones’ other co-creator, D.B. Weiss. The two women began trying to sell a TV series more than a decade ago; now they and their husbands all collaborate on The Chair, under the aegis of Benioff and Weiss’ production deal at Netflix.
Peet laughs easily, often breaking into a Julia Roberts-scale mega-smile. Over the course of an hour, she speaks about the inspiration for The Chair, becoming a first-time showrunner in midlife, and parenting shame—until one of her three children enters the room wailing pitifully, ending the interview and yanking Peet back into her multitasking reality.
Vanity Fair: The Chair is set in the English department of a university. Did you ever consider going into academia?
Amanda Peet: No! I was working on an idea with Jay Duplass about a widower who starts dating someone who’s his supervisor. It was a bunch of loose ends that I started to feel could all take place in a sort of claustrophobic workplace comedy. The more I interviewed [academics], the more I felt: these are just psychotic family dynamics happening over the course of many years. It seemed like a no brainer for a comedy.
You worked with the Duplasses on Togetherness. Did you start brainstorming The Chair after the series was canceled in 2016?
Yeah, we knew we wanted to work together so badly after Togetherness. Over the course of the last few years, we pitched each other various ideas, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this [widower] character in my head whose daughter had just left for college. So he’s in this empty house by himself, trying to put one foot in front of the other.
The Duplass universe seems to be a whirl of ideas and enthusiasm.
It was always my fantasy that filmmaking would be like a theater company, and you’d have writers and actors and it’s like this family—like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands—and you’d use your people over and over. Togetherness was the first time I felt like I was getting close to that fantasy that I had in my 20s.
So The Chair is your way of keeping the Duplass connection going?
I’m trying to keep it alive. [Laughs.] Also, he made me take my clothes off [in Togetherness], so then I had to make him take his clothes off. Payback’s a bitch!
Jay Duplass and Sandra Oh click so well in The Chair. When did she get involved?
I had her in my head when I was writing the pilot. There are a lot of actors who can’t play a romantic comedy, because they don’t have longing, they don’t really know how to play having a crush on someone. That was very important to me—maybe even especially because it’s a middle aged love story. I always thought she was exquisite, from [the play] Stop Kiss to Grey’s Anatomy to Killing Eve, obviously. Nothing against her co stars, but she could have chemistry with a doormat. She was very sensual and very alive to her attractions.
Sandra’s character, Ji-Yoon, speaks in Korean to her father. Meanwhile, her adopted daughter is Latina. How much did you and Sandra discuss those decisions?
We did a wide swath of casting [for the daughter], and when we decided to cast Everly [Carganilla], that introduced a whole other opportunity to explore [Ji-Yoon’s] relationship with her dad and the fact that she wants to honor her Korean heritage, but that she’s also very concerned that her daughter feels seen for being different, having different color skin. It was necessary to come up with story for Ji-Yoon about how she is caught between these different cultures, and how she can navigate that without hurting anyone.
You’re a white woman from New York. Did you consult with others on this material?
I took some things from my life and my friends’ lives…. And then some of it was just my partnership with Sandra—both of us were really interested in the same kind of issues. She was so into the idea of playing this kind of mother.
When you say you took some of it from your life, can you give any examples?
For one thing, I had postpartum depression after my first daughter was born, and I definitely felt really ashamed about that. And I continue to feel the pressures of trying to be a good mother. Even though intellectually I’m able to push away some of the things I read, or the feelings that I have, I still think I have this gnawing guilt that it’s not enough and I’m not enough and that my connection isn’t the right connection. And now that I have a teenage daughter, I was really interested in digging into my own sense of being a failure as a mom—the comedy of that. And also in foregrounding a family that is not a white mom, a white dad and white biological kids. We were both just like: let’s fucking do something new….
[Sandra] really loved the idea that I as a mom sometimes feel like the kid in the cafeteria who doesn’t know where to put my tray because I’m the uncool one—that feeling that you have an adolescent type of insecurity around your own child, even if they came out of your vagina!
Ji-Yoon is dealing with her daughter at home, and at work she’s learning to wield her new power as chair of the department.
Yeah, I think transition is sometimes especially hard for women coming into a supervising role for the first time at—I wouldn’t say the late stage of our careers, but even me becoming a showrunner at age 49…. It’s not easy for a lot of women to take that on and feel really natural about that. It’s deeply important to me to be perceived as being a fair person and a kind person and a person you could come to if you are uncomfortable. But I think a lot of us are told that that’s just a female thing, that it’s neurotic or makes you less of a leader.
As an actor, did you feel like your opinions were not always respected?
I definitely felt that way all the time. Part of it was because I worked with the wrong people. And part of it is, you want to be liked, so you need to be quiet and easy, to be chill—especially for actresses. As soon as you say, “Hey, on page 67, I was just wondering if this moment is tracking,” you can just see the writer and the showrunner and the director just being like [rolls eyes], HERE WE GO.
Sometimes performers write plays and shows so that they can finally get the parts they deserve. Why don’t you write roles for yourself?
God, if I try to write for myself, it doesn’t work. My ego gets in the way and all of the bitterness, like the accumulation of all the parts I didn’t get, all the things I sucked at, like, come to me like in this freight train, where it’s like, [in British accent] she’s going to segue into an English accent and put on a corset and ride across the moors. And then suddenly I’m doing heroin. And then I’m being really funny and goofy….Every time I tried to write for myself [David] would say, this seems just like you’re auditioning for an agent!
Academia has long been a battleground in the culture wars, and in the show there’s an incident in which Bill’s off-the-cuff riff on Hitler and fascism goes viral, and triggers a larger conversation about white supremacy.
It was really important to me that the transgressive incident was centered on something to do with my people: the Jews. I feel like it’s not my place to decide what’s transgressive anyway, but I felt if it wasn’t related to my Judaism, I couldn’t do it. The discussion that you just alluded to, it’s an important discussion to have. And I think Bill recognizes that as a white man, he’s not really in a position to to decide what’s hurtful in this scenario.
Do you have strong feelings about the role of social media in all this?
I said something in a magazine when I was in my early 30s that, if I’m sure, I would have been completely like [hands like explosion], if we had had social media then. But I also feel that it has evened the playing field in some ways. The system has for so long favored rich white people and we’re all due for a reckoning. …But again, I’m saying that as a white woman who went to private school in Manhattan and could afford psychoanalysis!
When your husband and D.B. Weiss finished Game of Thrones and made an overall deal with Netflix, people probably assumed their first Netflix show might be an epic drama. Instead, it’s a dramedy about academia. How did that happen?
Pure nepotism! So the four of us [Benioff, Weiss, Troyer and Peet] have written together—like a college writing workshop with just the four of us—for many, many years. So this was just the first time we made it official. And [Game of Thrones executive producer] Bernie Caulfield is now their partner. She was my producer, and she’s pretty much a miracle worker. And so I think, you know, part of what they wanted was to put me together with Bernie for my first time as a showrunner.
Was your husband on set too?
No, David was doing the school runs and full-time parenting. That’s the other thing: if you decide to showrun as an actress pushing 50, you’ve got to have a husband who’s willing to hold down the fort.
While Game of Thrones was in production, he was sometimes in other countries for the better part of a year, right?
The times when he wanted to complain about said school runs, soccer runs, whatever chauffeuring he was doing on weekends, I was able to say, buh buh buh: nine years, baby. NINE YEARS! Boy, it was fun.
You said that David is always focused on structure and action and plot. Were there specific elements he suggested for the show? I noticed that there are some physical fights but not a lot of beheading.
Do Game of Thrones in an English department!
It is kind of a game of thrones, if you think about it. They’re fighting for power over the department and the chair is kind of a throne.
He and Dave [D.B.] and Andrea rip it to shreds. Even though it hurts me, I took enough writing classes in college as an undergrad to know there’s not any way around it. Write down what people say, nod, go cry in the bathroom. And then roll up your sleeves.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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