It’s been six years since Cameron Diaz graced the silver screen – but according to the actor, the reality of life in the public eye made her decision to stop acting easy.
In a recent YouTube interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, Diaz said, “I realised I wanted different things out of my life. I had been going so hard for so long – I didn’t really make any space for my personal life.”
Speaking of Gwyneth Paltrow, hear all about her chaotic 2020 energy below:
When Paltrow asked Diaz what it felt like to walk away from such a successful movie career, the actress said, “I got a peace in my soul.”
“I finally was taking care of myself,” she said. “It’s so intense to work at that level, and be that public, and put yourself out there.”
“When you’re making a movie, they own you. You’re there for 12 hours a day, it’s for months on end, you have no time for anything else,” Diaz explained. “I realised I handed off parts of my life to all these other people and they took it. I basically had to take it back.”
“Actors are infantilised,” she expanded. “We’re put in a position where everything is taken care of for us. Your life becomes so narrow, everybody’s doing things for you. I never truly felt comfortable with that.”
“I needed to become self-sufficient again. I needed to know I could take care of myself… that I could navigate the world of the complexity of being an adult and having responsibility, and putting all the pieces of my life together, the way I wanted it to be – not how other people thought it should go,” she added.
Cameron Diaz isn’t the only actor to stop acting and step out of the spotlight. In 2017, Jessica Alba told Good Housekeeping she wouldn’t return to film unless she had creative. Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire has been focusing on production since his last role narrating the 2017 kids film Boss Baby and after burning some pretty high profile bridges, actor Katherine Heigl hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2017’s animated film The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature.
Hear all about the reasons that actors have said ‘see ya’ to Hollywood here:
Sounds like being a famous movie star isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, and us mere mortals probably tend to take our independence for granted.
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