Cameron Diaz, after retiring from movies: ‘The last thing I think about on a daily basis is what I look like’

Cameron Diaz was one of the best-known faces in Hollywood in the 1990s and 2000s, but her presence became ever smaller until she confirmed her retirement from the big screen in 2018. She has confessed on a number of occasions that she needed to definitively stop so that she could dedicate some time to herself, and that coming out of the spotlight had brought her “peace.”

In an interview with the singer Michelle Visage in her new BBC podcast Rule Breakers, the star of There’s Something About Mary spoke at length about how much her life has changed since she walked away from the movie industry after making Annie in 2014. “I am absolutely a victim to all of the societal objectification and exploitations that women are subjected to,” she said. “I have bought into all of them myself at certain times.”

My body’s strong, my body’s capable. Why am I going to talk down to it? Why am I going to be mean to it when it’s like carried me this far?

Cameron Diaz

The 49-year-old actress said it was really hard to stay away from established beauty canons. She would sit in front of the mirror, fixating on perceived problems. “You just start to pick yourself apart, you know,” she said. “And you’re like, ‘Why I am sitting here like being so mean to myself?’ My body’s strong, my body’s capable. Why am I going to talk down to it? Why am I going to be mean to it when it’s like carried me this far?”

But now, she says, she no longer does that. “I don’t care. Literally, the last thing I think about on a daily basis, like maybe not at all during the day, is what I look like,” said the Golden Globe nominee, who also revealed that she no longer bothers with a daily beauty routine despite having “a billion products” on her shelves.

“I literally do nothing,” she told Visage. “Twice a month if I’m lucky, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I better put this on. One time works, right?’ Like is that all I have to do? I’m just not in that place right now like where I put any energy.”

Instead, she is focusing on “staying strong” ahead of her 50th birthday, coming up in August.

Ever since her marriage to the musician Benjamin Madden in 2015, Diaz has decided to focus on her family. The actress has a two-year-old child, Raddix Madden, whom she is keen to keep out of the spotlight, as she told the host Kevin Hart in an interview on the talk show Hart to Heart in 2020, just a few months after the baby’s birth.