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Cameron Diaz

Cameron Diaz

STAR QUALITY: YOU can learn it – although in the case of Jessica Simpson, not – or you’re born with it. Cameron Diaz was born with it. There’s the vampish poses she throws in a shimmery minidress; the perfectly sculpted arms and legs, which she kept toned after being amazed by the results of Charlie’s Angels kung fu training; and there’s even the perfect skin (we were lied to!). But what makes Cameron Diaz
the ultimate comedy heroine isn’t physical. Any actress can have spectacular cheekbones – few use them for laughing their heads off. Cameron Diaz laughs with everyone, and this A-lister isn’t faking her sunny screen persona.

‘I really, really like to move through the world without being noticed,’ she says. ‘And that’s hard, because I’m tall and blonde.’ She stops herself. ‘I forgot I’m brunette now, because I’ve always felt brunette. I love heels, but I’ve accepted flats,’ she shrugs, concluding, ‘I dress down a lot because I don’t want the attention.’
Right on cue, some passers-by do a double-take. Other actresses might ignore them, but Cameron beams. The men exchange glances: ‘Holy crap, it is the girl from There’s Something About Mary, The Mask, Charlie’s Angels!’ Cameron Diaz can dress down all she likes, but as soon as she smiles, it couldn’t be anyone else. At the Marie Claire shoot, she’s goofing one minute, smouldering the next; you can see how her infectious laugh makes any male lead feel hilarious.

Now 34, Cameron’s sincerity and warmth make it impossible for her to be a slick, paparazzi-courting A-lister. ‘I’m a terrible celebrity. I suck at all of it,’ she sighs. The tabloids are, she says, ‘romance novels under the guise of journalism, by putting the word “Weekly” on the cover. Every week is a new chapter and they use real people as their characters, breaking up, moving in, getting pregnant, trying to kill each other.’ It says something for her easy-going nature that when I ask if self-confessed drug fan Justin has any drugs left for us, she has a laugh rather than storming out in a huff.

Cameron has dated Hollywood mavericks before (Matt Dillon, Jared Leto), but the papers smelled blood when she fell for Mouseketeer-turned-bad-boy Timberlake. Cameron and Justin, however, refused to play the game and talk about their relationship, so the press ran stories anyway. Most of them are downright anti-female: Justin dumping Cameron because she’s a shocking nine years older at 34. Somehow, you can’t see them writing that Brangelina are doomed never to survive their 12-year age difference. ‘I’m thankful it’s not my real life – every three months, I’m planning a wedding and calling it off,’ she says. ‘I get a laugh out of it, but sometimes you just think: “When is the public going to get enough?”

Cameron decided to beat the system: she diverted the press’s attention to her real passion – conservation. ‘When interest in our relationship was at a frenzy, I decided to do Trippin’ for MTV. If you are so bent on following me, then come on!’ Cameron charged off to the ends of the earth with friends like Drew Barrymore, Jessica Alba, Rebecca Romijn and Kid Rock to make a hip series about the environment. ‘I didn’t want a reality show about me being cute, I wanted to make the locations the star,’ she says. ‘Patagonia is one of the purest places on the planet, but now it’s starting to fall apart from pollution.’ What disturbs her most? She stalls. ‘I really am trying to remember. I start to wonder whether mercury is an issue. Maybe I should not have eaten sushi last week. I think it’s very psychological – you block things that are most important to you.’ Now we’re firing up. ‘The Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is really mind-boggling,’ she continues. ‘We can’t live without air, water or soil and we’re yet to find another planet that has any of that. Natural disasters are triggered by the way we use resources. At photo shoots, I see all the plastic bottles, paper plates and plastic utensils going in the trash, but is that better than putting them in a dishwasher using lots of energy? Finding the answer, getting the message out to people, that’s what keeps me awake at night. That and eating meat just before I go to bed,’ she laughs. ‘Maybe comedy is the only way – it’s really hard to be a conservationist when you’re a cynic.’

It sounds melodramatic, but in today’s America, Cameron is risking her image by talking about anything other than clothes and boys. On the Oprah show, she got so worked up about the state of American politics that she was close to tears. Not slick, but honest, yet American media responded by saying Cameron should be denied the right to vote. In contrast, her approach to the rest of her life is relaxed.
She’s the opposite of a tortured, calorie-counting artiste. ‘My mom never said anything like “I hate this” or “I wish that” about her appearance. She was very relaxed and self-possessed. That gave me confidence.’ Cameron isn’t always so carefree. ‘I want to be a big, fleshy, voluptuous woman with curves, I want a big bum but I don’t have one. I used to look at my bum and go, “Aw…”’ Ageing has made all the difference. ‘I’ve got a better relationship with my body, although everyone wants a different shape, even women with amazing bodies.’ She names Kate Moss as her fashion icon. ‘She’s a badass bitch!’ On hearing that Kate, post coke-scandal, reportedly upped her modelling prices for the labels that dumped her, Cameron says, ‘She should charge them more – your personal life is your personal life. Everyone makes mistakes – there’s no reason for her to apologise.’ This relaxed philosophy extends to her career. ‘I’m not reading scripts thinking, “What part can I shave my head for?”’ she laughs. ‘Which, by the way, I would be totally open to doing.’

She was open to most things on Charlie’s Angels. ‘We got to do explosions, fast cars, everything. If I’m hanging off a wire, I’m going, “How lucky am I to be doing this!” Even though I think there should be some $100,000 machine holding me up, not five Chinese men. If you ever got strung up in a harness, you would never put your baby in a papoose – it’s really painful! Comedy is the most difficult thing to do because often the laugh doesn’t exist until they edit it all together. You have to trust the director.’ Never was this more so than with the legendary hair gel/spunk scene in There’s Something About Mary. ‘I saw it in the script and I thought it was hilarious, but when it was time to do it, I said, “Are you really sure about this?”’ she admits. ‘But [director] Bobby Farrelly said, “Trust us, just trust us.” And when we saw it, I said, “You guys are geniuses – this is the most hilarious thing.”’ She describes an incident between herself and the Farrelly Brothers. ‘Peter looked up, saying, “I have this mark on my stomach. I don’t know what it is, but it keeps growing, keeps getting bigger… just take a look at it. What do you think?” Oh my God: he had his penis sticking out above the top of his pants!’ She chuckles.

The Holiday, her latest comedy from Something’s Gotta Give director Nancy Meyers and co-starring Kate Winslet, uproots her from LA to England. ‘I play a movie trailer editor with a place in California, Kate’s a girl who writes Birth, Marriages and Deaths for a newspaper, living in a little town outside London, and we swap lives. We both haven’t chosen the right guys, because we haven’t figured ourselves out, so we decide to leave it all behind. She puts her cottage on a home exchange website and says, “Let’s exchange tomorrow.”’ Cue fish-out-of-water mayhem. Cameron’s British romantic interest is inevitably Jude Law; she won’t reveal if Jude gets lucky. ‘Go and see the movie!’ she giggles, the multi-million dollar dirty laugh.

This interview has been edited for MarieClaire.co.uk; to read the full interview, pick up the December 2006 issue of Marie Claire.

Wednesday 8 November 2006


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