Matthew Shear makes his feature film writing and directorial debut with the romantic comedy, Fantasy Life.
Matthew is a filmmaker and actor based in New York. He starred in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, alongside Greta Gerwig, as well as the limited series The Alienist, opposite Dakota Fanning and Daniel Brühl. His other credits include Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, and The Boy Downstairs, opposite Zosia Mamet.
Matthew not only wrote and directed Fantasy Life, he stars in the film alongside Amanda Peet, Alessandro Nivola, Judd Hirsch, Bob Balaban, Andrea Martin, Zosia Mamet, and Holland Taylor.
Fantasy Life follows Sam, an anxious law school dropout, who stumbles into a job babysitting his psychiatrist’s three granddaughters and falls for the girls’ mother, an actress in a rocky marriage. This smart, New York-set romantic comedy premiered at SXSW ’25 and won the Narrative Feature Audience Award.
Check out our interview with Matthew: