Amanda Peet was diagnosed with breast cancer last fall, but she had an early warning sign that something was wrong six months earlier.
The actor revealed the “weird” symptom during an interview with TODAY on Thursday, Oct. 1.
“I was in my closet, I was probably putting something on and I felt a weird — it just didn’t feel like normal skin, but it wasn’t the frozen pea that everybody talks about,” Peet, 54, told Savannah Guthrie, referring to what a breast cancer lump can feel like.
“I went and I even got an MRI and then they sent me away. So I thought I had a clean bill of health, but they were actually watching it.”
Six months later, on the Friday before Labor Day in 2025, the actor thought she was going in for a routine scan, when her doctor spotted something concerning on her ultrasound, Peet wrote in an essay for The New Yorker.
She knew something was wrong because her physician, who was usually very chatty, went silent. The doctor then performed a biopsy and told her she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it on a Friday night, another concerning clue.
Peet said she’ll never forget the moment when she received her breast cancer diagnosis in a call soon after.
While lumps are the most common breast cancer symptom, skin changes like dents, swelling and redness can also be a warning sign. Skin that appears pitted, like the skin of an orange, is among breast cancer symptom a doctor monitors in herself.
Once diagnosed, Peet recalled having to deal with a “slow drip of information” about the treatment options, genetic information and hormone receptor status. “If you’re an anxious person, it’s your basic nightmare,” she noted.
The actor was diagnosed with hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative lobular breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation.
Lobular breast cancer accounts for 15% of all new breast cancer diagnoses, according to the National Cancer Institute. Tumors don’t usually form in lumps, making them hard to detect, especially in women with dense breast tissue, it notes. Peet has dense breasts and was told she needed extra monitoring. She’d been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups, she wrote in her essay.
Her cancer was caught early, at Stage 1. “I think about how lucky I was in so many ways,” she said.
Peet previously told Hoda Kotb that she has great health insurance, lots of support from her friends and family and a nanny.
“There were a lot of people around to take care of me, but not everybody has that,” she said. “So I’ve also been giving that a lot of thought.”