Cameron Diaz Names Her Most Despicable Character: “A Horrible Person”
Cameron Diaz has played many beloved characters, from princesses to angels. But one role stands out as a complete departure from her usual charming persona. She once took on a part so morally bankrupt that even she had trouble justifying it, leading to a surprising revelation about playing the bad guy.
With just a handful of exceptions, Cameron Diaz’s filmography is filled with characters who possess at least one admirable quality. She voiced the beautiful and fiercely independent Princess Fiona in the Shrek franchise, played a tough-as-nails pickpocket with a soft side in Gangs of New York, and became a quintessential screen icon in films like The Mask, There’s Something About Mary, and Charlie’s Angels, often portraying women who championed the underdog. This pattern is a consistent thread throughout her extensive career.
A Deliberately Unpleasant Role
In 2011, the actress took a significant paycheck to portray Elizabeth Halsey in the comedy Bad Teacher. The story kicks off when her character's wealthy fiancé breaks up with her, which forces her to actually pay attention to her job as a middle school teacher. Elizabeth is a mess; she drinks on the job, uses drugs, curses at her students, and generally behaves in every way an educator shouldn't. On the surface, she is a truly awful individual.
During a press event for the movie, Diaz explained what attracted her to such a rotten part. After years of playing likable figures, she seemed to enjoy the chance to explore a darker side. “There was absolutely not one ounce of energy spent on making anything about this character likeable,” she said, “It was genius. It was what I loved. I read 30 pages into the script and thought, ‘There’s no way I can play this character. How can I ever redeem her? There’s no redemption. This is a horrible person’. And ten pages later, I was like, ‘I think I like her’. By the end, I was like, ‘This is amazing because I don’t have to apologise’.”
No Apologies, No Redemption
Elizabeth's misdeeds are numerous, including scamming the school to fund her breast augmentation surgery, chasing a colleague solely for his money, and framing her main rival for several crimes. This is supposed to be a comedy, so one might assume a character like this would eventually see the error of her ways and have a change of heart. That's not what happens here. The film's final scene suggests that while she appears to have cleaned up her act, Elizabeth hasn't changed one bit, providing a subversive twist on the typical Hollywood ending. It's a shame the rest of the movie was largely forgettable.
Despite turning a healthy profit on its modest $20 million budget, critics weren't exactly lining up to praise Bad Teacher. The film was criticized for everything from its screenplay and premise to the lack of on-screen chemistry between Diaz and her co-stars, Justin Timberlake and Jason Segel. It was widely considered a low point in the leading lady's career for failing to deliver on nearly every front.
Out of all the great parts Diaz has taken on, Elizabeth Halsey isn't one that typically comes to mind first. However, when you consider how much fun it must have been to get paid to throw your morals out the window and act like the worst possible version of yourself without any real consequences, her decision starts to make a lot more sense.