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“It’s been a conversation for so many. It’s been a wonder – why did Cameron Diaz step away from the world of acting?” Kevin Hart asked the There’s Something About Mary actress during the Thursday (Aug. 12) episode of Kevin’s Peacock talk show, Hart to Heart. Kevin, 42, like many who watched Cameron, 48, in films like Charlie’s Angels, Bad Teacher, Gangs of New York, and the Shrek films, wanted to the motivation behind her decision to walk away, and she said it was because she wanted to make her life more manageable – and acting wasn’t fulfilling enough. “When you do something at a really high level for a long period of time,” she said, “other parts of you that isn’t that has to sort of be handed off to other people.”
“Different parts of my life, whether it was my home, or every aspect – from finances, or just the management of me as a human being, not me as ‘Cameron Diaz,’” she said. “But for my personal spiritual self, I was realizing it was that one part of me that functioned at a high level wasn’t enough.” Cameron did say she enjoyed acting — “It’s fun to do, I love it. I love acting. I could go forever. I literally feel like, sometimes, I have unlimited energy and inertia” – but she realized that there were “so many parts of my life … that I wasn’t touching and that I wasn’t managing. I couldn’t really manage it because it was so big. It was so massive.”
When asked when she made this revelation, Cameron said it was when she was 40. She also noted that while she has a “lot of great friends and people who have supported me for so long,” she also had other people “who were not serving my best interests.” Since deciding to walk away, Cameron said she was afforded the time to work on other aspects of her life: she met her husband, Benji Madden of Good Charlotte, and welcomed their daughter, Raddix, in December 2019. “For me, I just really wanted to make my life manageable by me,” she added. “My routine in a day is literally what I can manage to do by myself.” After making this change, Cameron says she feels “whole.”
Cameron spoke about this decision to quit acting during a February 2021 episode of the Quarantined With Bruce podcast. Will I ever make a movie again? I’m not looking to,” she said. “But will I? I don’t know. I have no idea. Maybe, never say never. But I couldn’t imagine being a mom now where I’m at as a mother, with my child at her first year, to have to be on a movie set that takes 14 hours, 16 hours of my day away from my child.”