The choice she made had nothing to do with her disliking being an actor, she just wanted to prioritize her life over her career.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on August 16, 2021. It has since been updated.
Cameron Diaz last appeared in the 2014 adaptation of Anne, in which she played Hannigan. Since then, she hasn't signed on any new roles, because she'd made up her mind to step away from acting by then. The 48-year-old star opened up about her decision to Kevin Hart on his Peacock talk show, Hart to Heart, where she revealed that her career was taking too much of her life, and she wanted to change that.
"Why did Cameron Diaz step away from the world of acting?" Hart, 42, asked Diaz, during the show. "What is it that motivated you to stop?"
She replied to Hart by talking about how she didn't like the fact that she was not in control of her own life; at least not as much as she'd wanted to be. Basically, it bothered her because, "When you do something at a really high level for a long period of time," other parts of you have "to sort of be handed off to other people."
According to PEOPLE, around the time the Bad Teacher star turned 40, she realized that there were "so many parts of my life ... that I wasn't touching and that I wasn't managing." It's not like she didn't enjoy acting anymore, she just wanted to simplify her life and get rid of her busy routine. "It's fun to do, I love it. I love acting," she said.
"For me, I just really wanted to make my life manageable by me," she explained. "My routine in a day is literally what I can manage to do by myself." The decision Diaz took actually helped her feel "whole" again, she assured Hart.
PEOPLE reports that, back in 2020, too, Diaz spoke to Gwyneth Paltrow about the choice she made, when the latter asked her how it felt to "walk away from a movie career of that magnitude?"
Saying that she felt peace in her soul for finally taking care of herself, she added, "It’s a strange thing to say, I know a lot of people won’t understand it, I know you understand it, but it was so intense to work at that level and be that public and put yourself out there."
"There’s a lot of energy coming at you at all times when you’re really visible as an actor and doing press and putting yourself out there," said the actor, whose first movie, The Mask, was alongside Jim Carrey, in 1994.
Her decision would have been very hard to make, but she's managed to succeed in life because of it, just like she'd wanted to because she finally had time for "all those things I didn't have time for before."
The There's Something About Mary star married husband Benji Madden in 2015. "We got married pretty much immediately because we realized we just had to do it," Diaz told Paltrow. "We went hard for a few years where we just ironed [our relationship] out, hacked it out. It was a lot of work, but we had to."
She added, "I'm older than him, not a lot older, but he was at the place in his life where he also wanted to do that as well." In 2019, the pair became parents to their beautiful daughter Raddix.
References:
https://people.com/movies/cameron-diaz-opens-up-about-stepping-away-from-acting/
https://people.com/movies/cameron-diaz-felt-peace-walking-away-movie-career/
Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Stuart C. Wilson
