The injury that permanently altered the course of Cameron Diaz’s career: “No one knew her”
Hollywood history is full of sliding doors moments whose significance can only be grasped with time. Take an injury that Cameron Diaz suffered in the early years of her career. That unfortunate incident cost her a role in a $122 million box office smash, with her part instead being played by a former Miss Teen USA. Who knows what would have become of Diaz if she’d managed to stay healthy enough to play that part? Would she have still gone on to the A-list stardom she enjoyed? Or would her career have flamed out like the actor who took her place in this action blockbuster?
In the early ’90s, New Line Cinema acquired the rights to make a movie based on a video game that hadn’t even been made available on home consoles yet. Producer Lawrence Kasanoff was convinced the gory fighting game had the potential to make a great movie, though, so he got the ball rolling on a Mortal Kombat feature film.
At roughly the same time, New Line was also turning another piece of IP into a movie: the Dark Horse Comics series The Mask. It had secured the services of Jim Carrey, a comedy star about to explode into the stratosphere, and Diaz, an unknown 21-year-old model making her movie debut. When Kasanoff and his team began searching for an actor to play Sonya Blade, though, one of the female fighters in Mortal Kombat, New Line decided to try a bit of cross-pollination.
In 2015, associate producer Lauri Apelian told The Hollywood Reporter, “The Mask was in postproduction, and Cameron Diaz was not a household name. No one knew her. New Line said, ‘Why don’t you look at some of the dailies that are coming in from this film and see what you think of this young, unknown actress?'”
Of course, the team saw in that footage what audiences worldwide would soon see: the birth of a new movie star. Apelian gushed, “As soon as we saw the dailies…there was no question that she was a star.” The team quickly signed Diaz up to play Blade and “put her into training because she had not really done this kind of martial arts work before.”
To everyone’s horror, though, Apelian revealed Diaz “broke her wrist right before shooting to the point where she couldn’t do the martial arts stunts we needed.” The team was forced to find a replacement, and they settled on Bridgette Wilson, who had auditioned seven times for the role.
Ironically, they had a close call with Wilson, too, because she booked the female lead opposite Adam Sandler in Billy Madison while the Mortal Kombat producers were still deciding whether to hire her. She told THR, “I went and filmed Billy Madison and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to lose the part,’ because they couldn’t make a decision. Then, on my last day of filming on Billy Madison, they called me up and asked, ‘Will you do it if we fly you out the next morning?’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’ I was so happy both worked out.”
Ultimately, Mortal Kombat, The Mask, and Billy Madison were all massive hits, but only Diaz would emerge with a true leading lady career. Wilson – who later became Wilson-Sampras when she married tennis star Pete Sampras – acted in a few more big movies but left the business in 2008. Diaz became a massive star but also chose to leave Hollywood in 2014, only returning in 2025 to star in the Netflix action comedy Back in Action.
For her part, Diaz has only spoken about losing out on playing Blade once. While promoting The Other Woman in 2014, she revealed her memory was that she hadn’t been hired for the role but was still in the audition process when she broke her hand, not her wrist. “They put my hands in gloves without wrapping them,” Diaz explained, “and said to punch. I only know how to punch one way, and that’s as hard as I can. I broke my hand and was taken out of the running for it.” She wasn’t too broken up about it, though, shrugging, “Everything happens for a reason.”
