Cameron Diaz Neil Mockford/GC Images
Cameron Diaz is grateful for her 10-year hiatus from acting — but she’s just as grateful to be back.
“Oh my God, I loved it. It was the best 10 years of my life,” Diaz, 52, said on the Friday, January 17, episode of The Graham Norton Show regarding her retirement from making movies. “I was just free to just say, ‘I’m a mom, I’m a wife, I’m living my life.’”
Diaz’s last project before her 10-year break was 2014’s Annie, in which she starred alongside Jamie Foxx. She and Foxx, 57, are both starring in Netflix’s Back in Action, which premiered on the streaming platform on Friday.
Diaz went on to say that stepping away from acting “made sense for [her] family” at the time, as she and husband Benji Madden, who she wed in 2015, share two children: daughter Raddix, born in 2019, and son Cardinal, born in 2024. Diaz added that after a while “people stopped asking” her to take on new roles. “It was so lovely,” she said.
Cameron Diaz had reached her breaking point. When Annie hit theaters in 2014, it marked her 38th movie in 20 years. “It’s so intense to work at that level and be that public and put yourself out there,” she told pal Gwyneth Paltrow during a 2020 Goop interview. “There’s a lot of energy coming at […]
Diaz has offered several reasons for why she ultimately chose to make another movie — Foxx being her costar in Back in Action among them. However, she further explained why she ultimately made the choice to step back onto the silver screen.
“It’s a privilege to do this,” she told host Graham Norton about acting. “I just said to myself, if I just let this go, all of this goodwill, all of this which I got to build over so much time, the passion that I have for entertaining people and making movies that [make] people smile and laugh and have a good time, and they sit in the theater or they sit at home and it moves them — if I don’t engage in that again and give that a chance and participate in it and be grateful for it, I would be a fool.”
Despite her return, it’s undecided if this will be a permanent career move for the actress. “This is maybe the beginning, maybe I’ll tiptoe in, maybe I’ll go gung-ho, we’ll see,” she said. “It’s here and I’m really grateful for it.”
Earlier this month, a source told Us Weekly that Diaz’s decision to act again “evolved over time,” adding, “It wasn’t sudden.”
In a December 2024 interview with Empire, Diaz shared that it was “hard to say” if she’d do another movie after Back in Action, saying, “I reserve the right to say no to doing a movie ever again, and I reserve the right to say yes if I decide to.”
Back in Action is now streaming on Netflix.
