Cameron Diaz’s 10-year retirement ‘best years’ of her life
Actress Cameron Diaz says the decade she spent retiring from showbiz were the “best ten years” of her life.
The “Holiday” star returns to the screen this month in the new spy thriller “Back in Action,” teaming up with actor Jamie Foxx.
However, it’s unclear if this is a permanent return to the show, as she told The Graham Norton Show “This could be the beginning of… I don’t know.”
When asked if she enjoyed taking a step back from anonymity, she said “gosh, I love it,” adding that she was “free” to be a mother and wife, but that she was “really grateful” to be back.
Her last role was as Ms. Hannigan in the 2014 remake of “Annie,” which also starred Foxx. However, Diaz did not officially confirm his retirement from acting until 2018.
Foxx, who has worked with Diaz twice before, said they convinced her to return to the industry by “very humbly” asking her if she would return and “delight us with her incredible talent.”
She says she’s back in the world of movies “at least in that regard” after a decade of “not even paying attention.”
But when Diaz received the script for this new project, she and husband Benji Madden said “maybe it’s time to switch things up a little bit for the family because, you know, this is Jamie.”
She added that it takes a special person to be “away from my family 10 hours a day.”
In Back in Action, Diaz and Jamie Foxx play a married couple (with kids) and ex-spies who are forced out of retirement when danger strikes and threatens their lives.
Speaking about her hiatus, Diaz called it the “best” decade of her life.
“I can be free to (like) ‘I’m a mom, I’m a wife, I’m living my life’ — and that’s really lovely.”
“Ten years from now, this will make sense to my family,” she explains.
Diaz said that when she first quit acting, she was still being asked to play roles.
“Everyone would say: ‘Would you like to—’ No.
“‘You know, there’s such a thing—’I don’t care.
“‘Do you want to join us?’ No, and then people stopped asking.”
Ten years on, she told Norton that she felt acting was a “privilege.”
“If I just let this thing go away, all the goodwill that I’ve spent so long building, my passion for entertaining people and making movies where people smile and have a good time… if I don’t I would be a fool to be a part of it any more, to give it a chance, to be a part of it and to be grateful for it,” she explained.
She added: “Maybe I’ll step in cautiously, maybe just go all out, I don’t know.”
