The most polarising of Cameron Diaz’s entire career: “One or the other, love or hate it”
Don’t worry, you are not alone in having taken a moment to yourself at some point over the past few years and thought, “Wait… what happened to Cameron Diaz?”
The answer to that, and the reason it feels like she simply disappeared from sight, or rather less dramatically, screens, is that in around 2014, she decided to take a break from acting altogether after about 20 years of constant filming and travelling, which is fair enough.
She did return, albeit briefly, in the aptly named Netflix movie Back in Action with Jamie Foxx, but it has been, without question, a very quiet 15 years or so for someone who, for some time between the late 1990s and 2000s, was the highest-paid actress in the world.
Diaz is generally thought of as a comic actor, but she also has no less than three Golden Globe nominations for her performances in some genuinely heavyweight movies in the form of Martin Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York, Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich.
She also made a name for herself as a bankable female lead in some hit comedies over a long period, including the brilliant Ben Stiller film There’s Something About Mary in 1998, everyone’s girlfriend’s favourite Christmas movie The Holiday in 2006, and four years before that alongside Anchorman’s Christina Applegate in a romantic effort that didn’t trouble the critics but has since gone down as something of a cult hit.
Asked by Andy Cohen if there is one of the movies that fans quote back to her most often, Diaz said: “I don’t know if there’s any one that people really quote. People don’t quote necessarily. But I’m always surprised, people will say to me…if they say that they like this movie, it’s not that they like it, it’s that it’s their favorite movie, is The Sweetest Thing.
Adding: “For whatever reason, that movie, it’s either one or the other, love it or hate it. People come up to me and they’re like, ‘I love that movie.’”
Directed by Cruel Intentions’ Roger Kumble, The Sweetest Thing tells the story of Diaz’s permanently single woman who finally meets a match, only for him to leave town, resulting in her grabbing her best friend and setting off on a road trip to track him down. As mentioned, it did not fare well on release with movie critics who slated it, and it scraped its way to a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But as a gross-out comedy for girls in the vein of the Farrelly Brothers movies, it has gained a devoted audience in the years since, ending up in lists of films that were unfairly overlooked and with Diaz’s performance attracting some acclaim. She went on to do more comedies like What Happens in Vegas with Ashton Kutcher and Bad Teacher with Jason Segel, both of which were massive hits on comparatively small budgets, before stepping away from the limelight for more than a decade.
Now, after more years away, Diaz is returning to Hollywood in a big way, with five different projects in various states of readiness, including Shrek 5, a new comedy just announced with The Office’s Stephen Merchant, the Jonah Hill-written and directed Outcome, which has completed filming, and an action comedy costarring Modern Family’s Ed O’Neill called Bad Day.
