Life’s a Screwball Comedy

Amanda Peet is worried about spilling the beans regarding her character in the new Bruce Willis-Matthew Perry comedy “The Whole Nine Yards.”

Warner Bros., which is releasing the movie Friday, has told Peet not to reveal the surprise twist involving her role as Jill, the spunky dental assistant who works for an unhappily married dentist named Oz (Perry). Jill also happens to fall in love with Oz’s new neighbor, Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Willis), a hit man hiding out from a crime family.

As the comedy progresses, it’s revealed that Jill isn’t exactly who she says she is. Peet, 28, will confess that Jill does handle a gun once in the movie. “I didn’t practice [shooting a gun], which was kind of humorous,” Peet says. “When I shot the gun, I was literally terrified. It was so loud.”

One thing that is no secret is that Peet, who stars on the WB series “Jack & Jill,” steals every scene she’s in opposite Willis and Perry, who plays Chandler on “Friends.” Just like the screwball comedians of the ‘30s like Carole Lombard and Irene Dunne, the actress is fearless when it comes to getting a laugh, including a wonderful funny bit involving her teeth.

“I think she is extraordinary,” says director Jonathan Lynn (“My Cousin Vinny”). “She has a tremendous flair. It’s a wonderful comedy performance. She has a real sort of immediacy, an extraordinary presence.”

On this early Saturday evening, at the end of an exhausting press day for the movie, Peet is curled up in a chair in her suite at the Four Seasons. The whippet-slim actress is wearing a “Whole Nine Yards” black baseball cap and is wrapped in a pink shawl.

Doing the Humor Genre Doesn’t Come Easy

Despite her seeming flair for comedy, Peet says she finds doing this genre very hard. “I think I have a habit of wanting to wink at the audience that I know it’s funny,” she says.

“Jonathan was really helpful. He kept saying, ‘Don’t play cute.’ I rehearsed with Lauren Holly, because she’s a good friend of mine, before I read with Bruce. I feel like she is responsible for me getting the role. She said, ‘You have to think about this [role] as if it is serious.’ ”

She acknowledges she was petrified auditioning with Willis. “We did three scenes,” she recalls. “My papers were shaking. I was like ‘Oh, my God. I am in a room with Bruce Willis. I am in a room with Bruce Willis.’ ”

Peet’s confession takes Lynn by surprise. “I saw no sign of her seeing comedy as difficult to do,” the director says. “I thought she made it effortless. What is great about her is that she is not finally concerned about how she looks. She is concerned about how she acts. She looks great, but there are a lot of beautiful actresses who wouldn’t do a scene like the one where she is picking her teeth. She just threw that in to give that moment a little more character.”

Peet found Willis an exciting actor to work with. “He’s not over it,” she says. “He’s not over being an actor. He just very much revels in acting and making a scene work.”

One of Peet’s funniest scenes occurs when she trips and falls while walking from Jimmy’s house down a slight hill. The actress admits the tumble wasn’t planned. She was wearing high-heeled shoes and just fell. Lynn couldn’t resist using the take.

“We all howled with laughter,” Lynn says. “I said, ‘That’s in the movie.’ It’s very funny.”

Suddenly, the door opens to Peet’s suite and in walks Perry, wearing the same baseball cap as the actress.

“Hey, dude,” Peet says with a smile. “How are you doing?”

Perry sits down on the sofa and says to the reporter, “What is she saying about me?”

“I was saying that you have been stalking me,” quips Peet, who is the girlfriend of actor Brian Van Holt, with whom she co-stars in the upcoming feature comedy “Whipped.”

“It started when I did ‘Law & Order’ six years ago,” she continues. “I started getting letters from him.”

Peet’s cell phone starts ringing. “Interestingly enough, that’s me calling,” Perry tells her. Peet responds with a funny face.

“Amanda is not smart and that’s what you should know and what I came in to say,” Perry says with a very Chandler-eque sly grin. “I am going to hug her now and leave.”

Peet gives her co-star a big hug, “Bye, sweetie,” she says, as Perry leaves.

She Makes Even Her Nude Scene Funny

“The Whole Nine Yards” marks the actress’ first nude scene. More funny than sexual, the scene got a huge laugh from the audience at a recent screening.

“I think one or two people have criticized it for what is said to be ‘gratuitous’ nudity,” Lynn offers. “I think it is an important story point and that she also plays it so funnily. If it was just sort of a nude scene, it would have been an embarrassment, but with her, it is part of the extraordinarily complex character that she plays. Anyone who can pull off a funny nude scene is quite a talent.”

The New York City native, who also hit the big screen recently as a publisher’s assistant in the Jacqueline Susann bio-comedy “Isn’t She Great,” began demonstrating an interest in performing when she was small.

“I did voices,” she recalls with a smile. “When I was 3, my mother took me and my sister to a play. My sister and I had a song that had ‘I beg your pardon’ in it. Someone on stage said, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and I ran up to the stage and starting singing our song, much to the mortification of my sister and mom. So she always said I wanted to be in theater. I guess I wanted to be there from the get-go.”

Peet began taking acting classes as a teenager, and during her junior year at Columbia University, she started studying with acclaimed theater actress Uta Hagen at her HB Studios.

“At the end of a scene she would say, ‘How do you feel?’ ” remembers Peet. “She would always use a pencil to do her notes while you were doing a scene instead of a pen so you could hear [her write] when you were screwing up.”

It took Peet three auditions to get into Hagen’s class. “Then I got the notice that I got into the class and I almost got myself killed crossing the street to my best friend’s dorm at Barnard [to tell her].”

During her four-year association with Hagen, Peet began getting work, landing some commercials and theater roles, including an off-Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing.”

The aforementioned 1995 episode of “Law & Order” was, as Peet describes, her “first chewy gig.” She played a Patty Hearst-type kidnap victim who falls for her abductor. “It gave me a lot of confidence,” she says. “It was sort of the beginning of me working.”