In Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life, Sam (Shear) loses his job as a paralegal and ends up with the next best option: taking care of his psychiatrist’s granddaughters. While he may be overqualified, he takes to this role very well and quickly develops a close bond with their mother Dianne (Amanda Peet) while her musician husband David (Alessandro Nivola) is away on tour.
Awards Buzz spoke Shear about the inspiration for this story and how much it echoes his own life:
“It comes from a lot of different places, but they all originate in my moment in 2018 when I was having trouble finding a job as an actor and started writing this script as kind of a way to cope with the challenge of it, and it just became this way to be creative that was separate from acting. It just broke open and I started weaving all of these different aspects of my life into it. It’s a real mix of memories and bent creative memories. It is not true, the story, but all of the seeds, I think I would say, are personal in some respect. I have done a fair amount of babysitting. In my twenties, when I was auditioning and had other gigs, one of them was babysitting for families on the Upper East Side, so, yeah, definitely drawing from my experience there.”
He shared whether he always knew he would play the leading role:
“I think, in my heart, I did for a long time. I was writing it kind of more just as a way to create a character that had aspects of myself in it, not necessarily to construct a part for myself. When the screenplay started to really have a shape, I realized, oh, I’m right for this.”
Watch the video above to hear about finding Peet and the rest of the great ensemble and what’s up next for him.
Fantasy Life is now playing in theaters.
