Amanda Peet — actress, playwright, Jewish mom – played tennis with The New York Times in a delightful new article. As she explains, “It’s really horrible to love something and suck at it so much.”
In the profile, Peet opened up about her career, her family, and, yes, playing tennis. Here are 9 things we learned about her:
1. She has a lot of anxiety keeping Games of Thrones finale details secret. Her husband, David Benioff, is one of the two co-creators of the show.
2. Not in the Times profile, but a really, really fun fact: Peet, along with Andrea Troyer (the wife of Benioff’s GoT co-creator, D.B. Weiss) wrote a kids’ book about being Jewish at Christmastime, called Dear Santa, Love, Rachel Rosenstein.
3. On her new show The Romanoffs, she plays a woman who is about to become a grandmother. (IRL she’s only 46!)
4. Peet is a super-competitive person, and her tennis grunt sounds like “the scream of a woman who has stepped on her cat.” (The New York Times’s words, not ours.)
5. Her play, “Our Very Own Carlin MCullough,” premiered this summer was about — you guessed it — tennis. The synopsis reads as follows: “A single mother discovers that her ten-year-old daughter is a tennis phenom. When a young, dedicated coach takes Carlin under his wing, her meteoric rise takes shape, and this threesome struggles over what is best when building up a champion.” She still thinks that “writing is easier than tennis.”
6. She has three kids with Benioff (OK, these details weren’t in the profile, but we had to include): Frankie, 11; Molly, 8; and Henry, 4. Her kids have the last name Friedman, which is David Benioff’s real last name (Benioff is his mother’s name).
7. She got her tennis coaches small roles in the final season of Game of Thrones, because they are big fans. (We are too! Hint, hint.)
8. She’s shortsighted. Stars, they’re just like us!
9. While playing tennis, she finally got into the swing of hitting the balls. As she commented, “Flow states are very difficult for Ashkenazi Jews.”
Header Image by Siebbi.
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