Cameron Diaz: Sex Tape
Actors and directors often talk about wanting to work together again, particularly when their movie has been both a critical and commercial success. It rarely happens.
Following their collaboration on the hit 2011 comedy Bad Teacher, however, director Jake Kasdan and his two leads, Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, were determined to find another movie project suitable for their combined talents.
They found it in Sex Tape.
“It was a game of comedy chicken and none of us was willing to turn the wheel!” says Jason Segel of the scene, while Diaz recalls it as being, among other things, an exercise in logistics. “While you’re shooting a sequence like that, you’re always aware that everything has to fit inside a screen,” she says, “and it’s also about how to get limbs in the correct position for any given shot.”
“No one makes it look easier than Cameron Diaz,” says her Sex Tape co-star, Rob Lowe, “and no-one wears the mantle of A-list movie star, sex symbol, icon, great actress and comedienne better than Cameron. She has the common touch, but she is also unbelievably sophisticated at the same time. She’s the real deal.”
The real deal indeed, and an actress who refuses to let age be a factor when it comes to choosing her film projects. “People always ask ‘are you worried about good roles now that you’re not 20 anymore?’”
Looking at the range of her films to date it’s clear the 42-year-old has become an impossible actress to typecast. In the last year alone, she has made a romantic comedy (The Other Woman), an R-rated comedy (Sex Tape), a Broadway adaptation (Annie), and even found time to play her darkest role yet, one half of a powerful drug couple, in Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor.
“If you went back to my very first junket for The Mask, people asked me the question: where would I like to be in 10 years? The answer has been exactly the same since that day. And that is, I just hope to be happy. That is my goal in life; to maintain a good level of happiness, and if that comes from making movies, then great!”
Meanwhile, with another watercooler movie on her hands in Sex Tape, the actress concludes by reflecting on what she feels is the real villain of the piece in this funny, romantic, irreverent, cautionary tale. “What’s really bad is the cloud,” laughs Diaz. “The uncertainty of the cloud is something of which we should all be very, very wary!”