After ten years, Cameron Diaz is back in action. In fact, it’s even the name of her latest Netflix film, where she and Jamie Foxx play married former spies who are pulled back into espionage after having their secret identities exposed.

As a 90s and noughties romcom linchpin, it’s likely that Diaz is re-entering the acting world cognisant of the scrutiny and misogyny that comes with stardom. Back In Action only landed on Netflix three days ago and ‘Cameron Diaz face lift’, ‘Cameron Diaz plastic surgery’ and ‘Cameron Diaz age’ are already breakout search terms on Google.

It seems that one of the most affronting things she has dared to do during her decade-long retirement, which, by the way, she has described as ‘the best 10 years of [her] life’, is age. In 2025 we are still very much in the trenches when it comes to understanding the effects of the passage of time – particularly on a woman’s appearance.

For the record, Diaz hasn’t had any surgery, but she has tried Botox. In 2014, she told Entertainment Tonight, ‘I’ve tried [Botox] before, where it was like [a] little tiny touch of something. It changed my face in such a weird way that I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to [be] like [that]’ … I’d rather see my face aging than a face that doesn’t belong to me at all.’

More recently, she opened up about feeling the weight of beauty standards during her decades long career. ‘I am absolutely a victim to all of the societal objectifications, you know, that women, and exploitations that women, are subjected to,’ she said on Michelle Visage’s podcast. ‘I have bought into all of them myself, you know, at certain times. It’s not hard not to. It’s hard not to look at yourself and judge yourself against other markers of beauty.’

Diaz has been famous for more than 30 years. She made her acting debut in The Mask in 1994, before taking up roles in cult classics like There’s Something About Mary, Charlie’s Angels and The Holiday, but after starring as Miss Hannigan in the 2014 remake of Annie she decided that she’d had her fill. Diaz retired from acting, rather inconspicuously we hasten to add, for 10 years so that she could ‘be free’ to focus on her family and to live a more private life. During this time, she married Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden, with whom she has welcomed two children.

‘Oh my God, I loved it. It was the best 10 years of my life,’ she told Graham Norton. During her hiatus, Diaz repeatedly turned down acting jobs until eventually people ‘stopped asking’. However, when Foxx came to her with Back In Action she could not resist the offer.

‘If I’m going to leave my family for 10 hours a day – I want to do it with the most talented man in entertainment,’ she said of Foxx, who also starred in Annie. ‘It’s just a privilege to do this. I thought to myself, just like, let this go away, all of this goodwill that I got to build over so much time, the passion that I have for entertaining people and making movies that make people smile and laugh and have a good time… if I don’t engage in that again then I would be a fool.’

What she might remember less fondly, however, is the unrelenting criticism and lack of privacy that comes with the territory. Speaking on the Skip Intro podcast last week, Diaz reminisced about her early years of fame and recalled the first time she noticed people filming her with their phone cameras – and the fear it instilled in her.

‘We were in Tokyo,’ she says, talking about her Charlie’s Angels co-stars Lucy Lui and Drew Barrymore, ‘and the three of us walked out and there was a whole wall of fans who were waiting for us. They knew we were there, and they were all holding something over their heads and we were like, “What is that? What are they doing?” and the woman who was our host there said, “They’re filming you”.’

‘The wind was knocked out of us,’ she continued. ‘We looked at each other, Drew and Lucy and I, and almost started crying. That really just flooded us. We were like, “Oh my God, it’s going to be everywhere. We’re not going to be able to do anything. If everybody has a camera on their phone and everybody has phones, it’s over.’

She was right. The ubiquity of smart phones and the subsequent arrival of social media has meant celebrities have little to no control over their own image. All Diaz has to do is step outside her front door and she is at risk of having her appearance torn apart by people she does not know and will never meet.

Of course, this is exacerbated tenfold when she’s the face of a new Netflix film and appears on mainstream talk shows, podcasts and press junkets to promote it. Almost in an instant, dissecting Diaz’s appearance has become ‘fair game’ again. Social media users start questioning whether she has had anything done and commenting on how ‘different’ she looks to when she was last in the spotlight and soon follows the typical, toxic debate about how well she’s playing the age game.

Last summer, a clip of Diaz speaking about her book, The Body Book, resurfaced – ironically from 2014, the year she went into retirement – where she talks about society’s deeply flawed relationship with ageing. ‘We, especially women, don’t allow ourselves to age gracefully. We don’t allow other women to age gracefully. […] We feel like if we’re not how we were when we were 25 years old, if we don’t look the same, that we have failed in some way,’ she offers. ‘We have not done our job by staying in a stagnant place. I always want to be changing, and I always want to be getting older. I always want to be getting wise. That, to me, is a privilege.’

She then points out: ‘Not everybody gets to do it. The only alternative is that you’re dead.’ It may sound curt, but it’s probably not something we give enough thought. Ageing is something that everyone should appreciate as a sign that they are still alive. And if we all hate our appearances and focus on the negatives now, when we’re at our youngest, then we have a long, long road ahead.

More than 10 years later and Diaz’s comment is just as pertinent today. When will we stop harassing women for visibly ageing while simultaneously ridiculing those who attempt to defy the ageing process with plastic surgery? Diaz can’t win, none of us can.

Sadly, a world in which we celebrate Diaz’s return to the big screen and focus on her performance instead of looking for evidence that she’s had Botox or a face lift still feels like a distant utopia – especially if this kind of behaviour goes unchecked.

Fortunately, she seems grounded in reality and she’s not willing to let society’s pitfalls put her off returning to an industry she loves. As well as Back In Action, Diaz has already filmed an upcoming Apple TV+ black comedy, Outcome, alongside Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill. ‘This is maybe the beginning, maybe I’ll tiptoe in, maybe I’ll just go like gung ho! I don’t know,’ she told Norton.

Unless we stop tearing women apart for no reason and reducing them to their physical appearance, we cannot expect them to willingly stick around for long. No wonder Diaz’s retirement was the best decade of her life, let’s hope internet trolls don’t force her back into another one.