The actress’ health scare came as both of her parents were dying in hospice care.

Amanda Peet reveals breast cancer diagnosis

The actress' health scare came as both of her parents were dying in hospice care.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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on March 21, 2026 3:56 p.m. ET

Amanda Peet in April 2025. Credit:

Dominik Bindl/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty

Amanda Peet is opening up about her breast cancer journey.

The *Your Friends & Neighbors* actress penned a candid, vulnerable essay chronicling her health crisis, which coincided with both of her parents dying in hospice care.

"For many years, I’ve been told that I have 'dense' and 'busy' breasts — not as a compliment but as a warning that they require extra monitoring," Peet wrote for *The New Yorker*. "I had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups."

Peet saw her doctor in August 2025. "Dr. K. usually chatted me up while she examined me, but this time she went silent," the actress recalled. "She told me that she didn't like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy. After the procedure, she said that she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it to Pathology. That's when I knew." The next day, Peet's doctor reported that she had a tumor that "appeared" small but would require an MRI in the near future to ascertain "the extent of the disease."

The *Something's Gotta Give* star said the doctor explained that she would also soon learn her receptor status, which would reveal the toughness of her particular strain of cancer. "It's like dogs," her doctor said. "You have poodles on one end and, on the other, pit bulls."

Amanda Peet in April 2025.

Cindy Ord/Getty

That same weekend, Peet's father died, and she flew from Los Angeles to New York to see her family. "I didn't make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment," she recalled. "As soon as my dad's corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again."

After returning home, the *Togetherness* actress decided not to tell her mother about her diagnosis or her father's death, as she was in the final stages of a battle with Parkinson's disease. Peet took anxiety medicine as she waited on her results. "I sucked on little chips of Ativan all day, but my blood pressure was so jacked they didn't even register," she said. "Then, at 4:42 p.m., Dr. K. texted: 'All poodle features!'" This meant that the actress' cancer would be treatable.

"You'd think that I had just taken Ecstasy," Peet wrote. "I was happier than I'd been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn't have cancer."

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However, she quickly panicked again after remembering that she still required an MRI, and that her doctor said the radiologist would check her lymph nodes and the other breast for "surprise findings" shortly thereafter.

The radiologist ended up finding a second tumor in the same breast. "She ordered an MRI-guided biopsy, which is when a tumor sample is extracted while you're inside the big white imaging doughnut," she recalled.

Peet said the procedure was a horrific experience, despite the best efforts of a tech nicknamed Tom.

"Tom helped me lie on my belly and lowered my traitorous breast into a horizontal, doll-size lunette," she remembered. "She injected the pain medication, which was so excruciating that there was no way white-knuckling it could have been worse. Then came an injection of dye, to make the suspicious mass stand out, and finally Tom slowly flattened my breast — while it was hanging in the air — with a barbaric waffle iron, whose latticed squares were numbered to locate the target site for the needle. Tom and my doctor called coordinates back and forth, as if playing a perverse game of Battleship, to confirm the quadrant of interest."

At the end of the procedure, the doctor said "it was 50-50 whether or not there was more cancer."

Amanda Peet on 'Your Friends & Neighbors'.

Peet's doctor told her that the second mass was benign, which meant she would only require a lumpectomy and radiation rather than chemotherapy or a mastectomy.

"Radiation wasn't bad compared with Tom's waffle iron — until the last stretch, when my nipple became charred and blistered, like an over-roasted marshmallow," she detailed.

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Peet began to make funeral arrangements for her mother two weeks after she received her first clear scan in January. She was with her mother during her final moments of life.

"I wasn't sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting, disembodied shapes," she remembered. "I said 'howdy doodle' — that's how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything."

Peet's full essay about her cancer journey and her parents' deaths can be found in *The New Yorker*.**

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