Cameron Diaz names the most unlikable role of her career: “This is a horrible person”
Apart from a few notable exceptions, the characters played by Cameron Diaz always have at least one redeeming feature.
In the Shrek series, she is the glamorous, coveted, and strong-willed Princess Fiona, in Gangs of New York, she’s a rough pickpocket with a heart of gold (and an accent of pure horror), in The Mask, There’s Something About Mary, Charlie’s Angels, and many more, she’s the epitome of a big-screen sex symbol with an affinity for the underdog, and this is a trend that you can find throughout her career.
In 2011, the blonde bombshell accepted a massive pay packet to star as Elizabeth Halsey in the comedy Bad Teacher, where her character’s life is turned upside down when her rich boyfriend dumps her, forcing her to take her job as a middle school teacher seriously for once. She drinks, she dabbles in drugs, she swears at students, and generally does everything that you’re not supposed to do as an educator; on paper, she’s a pretty awful person.
During a press conference promoting the film, Diaz revealed why she was drawn to such a rotten character, which, perhaps due to her history up to that point of playing goodie-goodies, she relished the opportunity to embrace her dark side.
“There was absolutely not one ounce of energy spent on making anything about this character likeable,” she said, “It was genius. It was what I loved. I read 30 pages into the script and thought, ‘There’s no way I can play this character. How can I ever redeem her? There’s no redemption. This is a horrible person’. And ten pages later, I was like, ‘I think I like her’. By the end, I was like, ‘This is amazing because I don’t have to apologise’.”
Among many, many others, Elizabeth’s sins include defrauding the school to pay for breast implants, pursuing a co-worker because of his wealth, and framing her primary rival for various crimes. This is meant to be a comedy, by the way, so you might expect a character like this to go through a redemption arc or have a Scrooge-like moment of realisation and change their ways, but not this one.
While it seems like she’s turned her life around, the final scene of the movie reveals that Elizabeth hasn’t changed at all, offering a nice, subversive twist on this traditional sort of ending; too bad the rest of the film was pretty terrible.
Though it made good returns on its fairly modest $20million budget, critics were not kind to Bad Teacher. Everything from the script to the concept to the lack of chemistry between Diaz and her co-stars Justin Timberlake and Jason Segel was brought into question, with its underdelivery in almost every arena generally deeming it to be one of the low points of its leading lady’s career.
Of all the many great roles Diaz has played, Elizabeth Halsey doesn’t immediately leap out; however, when you think about how much fun it must have been to get paid to cast your morals to one side and be the worst possible version of yourself with zero consequences, it starts to make a lot more sense.
