Amanda Peet had just wrapped Season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbours when she received her shock breast cancer diagnosis. But she says it was “helpful” to know that co-star Olivia Munn had “been through something similar”.
“Olivia and I haven’t really been together since it all happened. But yeah, I feel like she’s made a huge difference,” the 54-year-old actress, who plays Mel Cooper, the ex-wife of Jon Hamm’s Andrew “Coop” Cooper, tells TV WEEK.
Just a day before we sat down to chat about the second season of Apple TV crime-drama Your Friends & Neighbours, Amanda revealed in an essay in The New Yorker that she too is battling the disease. Tragically, she learnt the news while both her parents were at the end of their lives, in hospice in opposite sides of the country.
Olivia, 45, went public with her breast cancer diagnosis in March 2024. She had been diagnosed the previous year.
Keeping her diagnosis quiet for the sake of her kids
Amanda initially kept her diagnosis under wraps for fear of it being leaked and her kids finding out. She and Game Of Thrones co-creator husband David Benioff are parents to Frankie, 19, Molly, 15, and Henry, 11.
“I was diagnosed after we finished shooting [Season 2] – like a week later,” she tells TV WEEK. “And because I have children who are older, who are teenagers, David and I were very secretive in the beginning because we were terrified and we didn’t want to have our children find out somehow.
“I’ve always been a very open person,” she adds of her eventual decision to go public on her own terms. “I didn’t have any kind of strategy when I started writing, I didn’t set out with any kind of agenda. My parents weren’t very religious, so maybe it was a way for me to kind of have a kind of ritual that I was doing, I don’t really know, to be honest.”
Whatever the reason, Amanda says it helped her find a supportive community.
“It’s incredible the community that comes forward,” she notes. “There’s a whole network of women who are friends of friends and friends and cousins and mums and people who all just start texting you, being like, ‘What do you need? What kind is it? What’s your hormone receptor status? Which surgery are you going to?’ All of this very beautiful part of it.”
Five surgeries down, Olivia’s armour has been stripped
For Olivia, 45, her breast cancer journey has been hard fought.
Sitting down with TV WEEK, the star reveals the show marked a significant chapter in her recovery. She makes a welcome return to Your Friends & Neighbours as duplicitous Samantha Levitt, Coop’s one-time lover who framed him for murder last season.
“I was diagnosed in 2023. And then when I talked about my journey in 2024, I still hadn’t gotten through all of the big parts of being diagnosed with breast cancer,” she explains. “By that point, I’d had four surgeries. And right before we started filming Your Friends & Neighbours Season 1, I had my fifth and, so far, final surgery.”
She says her diagnosis saw her subconsciously drop the armour she’d built up to protect herself.
“In that moment, in the room, when the doctor says, ‘It’s cancer,’ it floors you,” she says. “I was like, ‘I cannot climb this mountain that’s in front of me with all this extra weight. I can’t do it.’ Through that process, what I found was that by shedding that armour, I had made myself more vulnerable. And that has actually made me stronger.
“The vulnerability has made me a better mother, a better wife, a better friend and a better actor. I feel so much more confident on set because of these life experiences.”
Feeling stronger and more capable than ever
The star cites her “tough childhood” with forming her hard exterior. In hindsight, she can see now that it only limited her.
“I mean, I had a tough childhood. I had a horrible dynamic in my childhood and my family,” she explains.
“So I was pulling in from stuff like that. But that created just a tough exterior that I always kind of went back to,” she adds. “In a way, it really limited me. And so going into Your Friends & Neighbours, the strength that was coming from me was from that vulnerability. And I didn’t lead with it.”
A mum-of-two, Olivia has son Malcolm, four, and daughter Méi, one, with husband John Mulaney. When it comes to cancer, she says she always wanted to “lead with hope”.
“I wanted people to understand that, yes, it is very difficult and there [are] parts that are terrifying and strenuous, but there’s so much hope,” she says. “And I wanted other people going through this to hold on to that hope.”
Admitting she had “no idea” if she’d ever work again at the height of her battle, she says she feels “more capable” than ever now as an actor.
“There were times where I was offered to go out for a project or meet on it, or even just been offered it, and I said no out of the fear that I couldn’t do it,” she reflects. “Now, I feel like I can take on any project.”
Season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbours premieres on Friday April 3 on Apple TV
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