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Cameron Diaz is making a comeback after having gone into self-imposed retirement ten years ago. Her last appearance had been in 2014 when she starred in Annie. Her upcoming projects will include the appropriately named Back in Action and Shrek 5.
The 53-year-old actress told Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit on Monday of this week that her decision to step back was based on self-interest. “[It] was something I just had to do,” she said. “It felt like the right thing for me to do to reclaim my own life and I just really didn’t care about anything else. Nobody’s opinion, nobody’s success, no one’s offer, no one’s anything could change my mind about my decision of taking care of myself and building the life that I really wanted to have.”
Since 2014, Diaz has been focusing on her private life. She married rock musician Bemji Madden of Good Charlotte, and had two children: daughter Raddix and son Cardinal. In 2020, with business partner Katherine Brown, she launched the Avaline wine brand.
Diaz is making her film comeback in January 2025 when Seth Gordon’s Back in Action (also starring Jamie Foxx), will premiere on Netflix. Reportedly, she will also appear in the forthcoming Shrek 5 and is talking about starring in Outcome, a dark comedy with Keanu Reeves.
Explaining her return to the big screen, Diaz was quoted as saying: “It was just the right time for my family. After COVID, we were in the house for a long time, which was amazing and the problem was we would probably stay there, we would still be there right now. People would be like, ‘It’s over,’ and I’d be like, ‘No it’s not, it’s not over for me.’”
Continuing, Diaz credited her husband with being supportive of her decision: “So I had to push myself; my husband and I — my husband, who is the best — he was like, ‘You’ve been supporting us and building the family’ and supporting him in his businesses, he’s like, ‘It’s time for us to support you and let Mommy ascend and do her thing.’ He’s like, ‘Let me see you do it, girl.’ I was like, ‘All right, here we go.’”
Diaz also credited Jamie Foxx for backing her decision to resume her professional career. The two had appeared together in Annie as well as Oliver Stone’s 1999 film Any Given Sunday. She told The Hollywood Reporter that she “couldn’t say no to Jamie. He said, ‘Come with me’ and I said, ‘OK let’s do it;’ it’s our third film together so it’s really great.”
She added, “It really comes to what are you passionate about? For me it was to build my family.”
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