Cameron is Hollywood’s best-kept secret
Cameron Diaz is not retiring. Reports that she was (in order to spend more time with herself) were erroneous – triggered by a joke made by friend and fellow Sweetest
Thing actress, Selma Blair in an interview (Blair has since retired as Diaz’s spokesman). And while menfolk across the globe are exhaling for the first time in 24 hours, I’m relieved for a different reason.
Back in 2014 – the same year the 45-year-old actress last appeared on the big screen, in Annie
– I had one of the most enjoyable interviews of my career with Diaz.
It was Valentine’s Day and we were nominally there to discuss the workings of Diaz’s digestive tract (she had just written her wincingly honest wellness manual, The Body Book).
But things took a wild and blessed two-hour tangent, and over the course of a massive lunch on a West Hollywood rooftop during which the actress turned to the man sitting behind her and expressed concern “that my butt crack is hanging out,” Diaz explained why she had a thing about British men (“so smart and funny”), why noses are an undiscovered erogenous zone (“it’s the first thing you come into contact with when you go to touch each other – when you go in for that first kiss”) and why the veganism that was only then starting its fad life wasn’t for her. “I need blood,” she growled, hunched, tiger-like, over her steak. “Can you smell that beef? I can actually feel the hairs on my neck pricking up.”
Yes, she’s a great comic actress who doesn’t look like she’s been pickled in botulinum toxin, but it was the fact that Diaz turned out to have one of the dirtiest laughs in Hollywood, the appetite of a Texan trucker and once triumphed in a celebrity burping contest that won me over. There was none of the suffocating piety you see now in so many young stars.
Diaz wasn’t constantly keeping herself in check or making sure every utterance was “on message”. She clearly didn’t see the need to appoint herself the world’s moral arbiter on anything other than bowel movements.
The whole package was just so, well, unexpected. Although nothing came as more of a surprise than Diaz’s final admission that there was only really one man in the world for her:
Sir David Attenborough.
“I’m so amazed by that level of knowledge,” she swooned, remembering the moment they once met on the Graham Norton Show. “I think it’s beautiful. If I’d known David years ago, he might have been the one to tame me. He almost tamed me that night.”