As a culture, we’re hard on our beautiful blondes. We may automatically presume everything should be easy for a conventionally gorgeous, flaxen-haired performer with a visible-from-space smile. We may even assume that because she’s beautiful, she can’t be all that smart. Tell it to Marilyn Monroe, who felt pressured the whole of her all-too-short career to prove that she was a serious actor, something we can now see clearly in her body of work.
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A comic actor is also, of course, a serious actor—there’s nothing more serious than the art of comedy. And sometimes we don’t know how much we’ve missed an actor until she’s been away for a long time. That’s what happened with Cameron Diaz: one minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. Actresses often take breaks to have children, a privilege we grudgingly allow them. But they usually come back after a year or two. Diaz didn’t. After 2014’s Annie, her IMDb trail grew cold—until now, with the release of her Netflix comeback film Back in Action, in which she reunites with Jamie Foxx, her co-star in Annie and the 1999 film Any Given Sunday. The movie isn’t great. But if it means there’s more Cameron Diaz in our future, let’s take it.
Why does a wonderful actor quit when she’s still getting roles, and when she’s still young and beautiful enough to dazzle a world obsessed with youth and beauty? Diaz has said she quit filmmaking to focus on raising her children, with Benji Madden (of the rock band Good Charlotte). To a selfish universe, this is a boring reason to step away from the entertainment business; to a human being, and the kids growing up in her care, it’s everything.
If you look at Diaz’s credits, from her debut (and surprise success) in 1994’s The Mask through Annie, you’ll see she worked steadily for two decades. Her films clearly made money—Hollywood doesn’t keep asking you back if your movies tank. Yet for every performance we remember vividly—as the good-natured misuser of “hair gel” in There’s Something About Mary, as the wonder-ditz Natalie in Charlie’s Angels, as Tom Cruise’s unhinged yet strangely sympathetic sometime-girlfriend in Vanilla Sky—there are dozens of others that we perhaps haven’t thought about in years. Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, Kirk Jones’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes: It’s not that Diaz was bad in those movies; it’s simply that they’re unmemorable movies, and in some cases, she’s the best thing about them.
But scrolling through Diaz’s credits also reminds us how many times she’s been truly great. Back in Action may not be the comeback many of us were hoping for: directed by Seth Gordon, it’s the story of two former spies (Foxx and Diaz) who, 15 years after quitting and going underground, are drawn back for one last mission, this time with their kids in tow. The movie has an easy-going, family-friendly vibe, which is perhaps one problem: its wholesomeness means there are very few chances for either Foxx or Diaz to be disreputably naughty, though they try. But even if Back in Action is generally tame and bland, you can’t hold that against its stars. Their timing still has that pinpoint zing; their off-the-cuff casualness gives the movie whatever breeziness it’s got. And Diaz, who looks fantastic not just for her age but for any age, centers the movie without clamping down on it. She needs a smarter, nuttier comedy or caper than this one—but that’s a prayer we need to make to the movie gods.
Because looking back at the high points of Diaz’s career—even some of those movies we may not have thought about in a long while—reveals the scope of her brainy-breezy talents. In her comic gifts, she’s one of Marilyn’s heirs. She’s not afraid to come off as dizzy, a little checked-out—but that’s all part of her sweet con. Her face isn’t just beautiful; it has a great second banana’s expressiveness—the face of a person who, maybe, was surprised to find herself a movie star. With those apple-contour cheekbones, those always in-on-the-joke electric blue eyes, Diaz is like a ’30s comic-strip heroine come to life, always up for a good time. But she can be serious, too—in Vanilla Sky, when her seemingly carefree character realizes she’s been betrayed and humiliated, the depth of her insecurity becomes painfully clear. She’s the most believable element of an otherwise ridiculous movie.
Read more: The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2024
And how many times has she made us laugh, seemingly without even trying? As Natalie in Charlie’s Angels, she lets herself be wooed by the equally charming Luke Wilson. They’ve just met; they flirt with each other in a space beyond sensible language. “Thursday?” he says, hoping to set up a date. “My favorite day!” she answers brightly. “I’ll get tickets,” he offers helpfully. “I love tickets!” she volleys back. This is a love affair blossoming on the planet of non sequiturs, the kind of repartee moviegoers used to get with William Powell and Carole Lombard, or Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.
But two of my favorite Diaz performances are ones that seem to have somehow fallen through the cracks, in movies that are rarely revisited or talked about. In Danny Boyle’s marvelously unhinged 1997 lovers-on-the-lam confection A Life Less Ordinary, Diaz plays Celine, an heiress who’s kidnapped by a hapless janitor, Ewan McGregor’s Robert. Robert has no idea how to pull off a successful kidnaping. Celine, who’s been through it before, takes pity on him and shows him the ropes. This is how the two fall in love. Diaz, so young at the time—she would have been around 24—already knew how to convey the perfect blend of vulnerability and insouciance. She makes her entrance as Celine, the bored little rich girl, by aiming a gun, William Tell-style, at an apple perched on the head of one of her servants. From the first minute, we can see that she’s up for this go-for-broke adventure, a picture that’s both jarringly weird and unrepentantly romantic.
And then there’s Jake Kasdan’s 2011 masterpiece—and I do not use that word lightly—Bad Teacher. Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a shallow, checked-out middle-school teacher who, as the movie opens, thinks she’s going to be leaving her drab classroom full of rugrats forever. She’s about to get married to a rich guy—as she peels out of the school parking lot in her shiny red sports car, a cigarette dangling from her lips, she calls out to her painfully earnest colleagues (among them Lucy Punch, John Michael Higgins, and the marvelous Phyllis Smith), “Adios, bitches!” She doesn’t know that that rich fiancé is going to dump her, which means she’ll have to come crawling back to her job, in her customary teaching uniform of tiny body-con minidresses and sky-high Louboutin heels.
Elizabeth is the worst teacher—on her first day back, she toddles into class so hungover she can barely walk and pops Stand and Deliver into the school DVD player; she then pulls up her hoodie and plunks her head down on the desk for a nap. All she wants is to meet a rich guy and get out of this teaching racket, forever. She thinks larger breasts will help her achieve this goal, but she has no money, so she embezzles cash from the school’s annual car wash to bulk up her funds—though she did show up for that car wash in short shorts and towering espadrilles, so you could argue she earned that dough fair and square.
In any event, Elizabeth is a terrible teacher through most of Bad Teacher. Her redemption comes very late in the movie, so we have plenty of time to enjoy her complete and unrepentant badness. This is how it should be. Bad Teacher may not be the kind of movie Diaz wants her own kids to see—at least not just yet. But its unwholesomeness, with Diaz in the driver’s seat, is the purest kind of movie pleasure. Diaz has grown up and matured—everyone has to, at some point. She played bad teacher Elizabeth Halsey at exactly the right time. Maybe, in her near future, there’s another unhinged role that will be perfect for where she’s at now. Another 10 years will be too long to wait.
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