Cameron Diaz is back — and making it look easy. In Back in Action, Diaz plays Emily Reynolds, a seemingly average suburban mom who, alongside her husband Matt (Jamie Foxx), is actually a former secret agent. Naturally, their retirement doesn’t last very long, and soon the pair and their two children are off on a globe-trotting adventure.
Diaz can relate. Back in Action is the There’s Something About Mary star’s first film in almost a decade. But she had no trouble getting back in Back in Action’s action. “It’s like riding a bike, you know what I mean?” Diaz told host Krista Smith on the latest episode of Skip Intro. “When you go back to something that you’ve done, there’s so much of it that you don’t have to think about. I was like, ‘Oh man, I just know how to hit my mark. I know what questions to ask the cameraman.’ The set was second nature to me.”
But why this set? It all comes down to talent: namely, Foxx, Diaz’s Any Given Sunday and Annie costar. “I just know him as a person and I know him as a professional and I thought, it’s such a tricky thing, going to work every day with somebody,” Diaz told Skip Intro. “What are you going to get? The unknown is something that I wasn’t interested in. If I haven’t done a film in 10 years, if I’m going to go back to doing what I really was happy stepping away from, then who I do it with is really, really important.”
Enter Foxx. “I knew what I was going to get from Jamie as a partner, as a professional, as a talent,” Diaz said. “I just was like, ‘Yeah, this makes sense.’ If I’m going to do it, Jamie’s the guy.”
Diaz has come a long way from her first days learning the ropes on a film set. While shooting her first film, 1994’s madcap crime comedy The Mask, the young model had an epiphany that’s lasted her an entire career.
“I realized how I was being managed on the set,” Diaz said. “They’re like, ‘Where are you going? Do you need something? We’ll get it for you. Oh, don’t let your feet touch the ground. Here, sit in this chair here.’ And it was because they wanted to know where I was at, because if they didn’t know where I was at, it costs them time, and time costs money.”
So, Diaz concluded, things would be easier if she simply promised to pull her weight. “I’m an adult, I’m capable of doing it myself,” she said to herself. “I will be there. I’m not going to just be taking a car to McDonald’s. … I realized all of this special treatment that actors get, that you can get really caught up in, where they’re just like, ‘No, you don’t have to do that for yourself, I’ll do it,’ isn’t about me. Wasn’t about me ever. And so, it didn’t define me.” It’s a healthy headspace to be in — especially when you’re Back in Action.
For more great celebrity interviews, check out Skip Intro with Krista Smith on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
