Rome, 10 July 2022 – “In the nineties, a few weeks before being chosen for the film The Mask with Jim Carrey, I could have been a drug courier“. The shocking revelation comes from Hollywood star Cameron Diaz, now 49, who is about to return – after eight years of hiatus – to cinemas sits down with Jamie Foxx in the comedy ‘Back in action’. The mind, however, now goes back to those days of 1994when Diaz was “a model in financial difficulty in Paris, finding the only ‘use’ to be a ‘mule’ to transport drugs in Morocco“. Speaking on the Second Life podcast, the actress said she lived in the French capital for a year, but didn’t achieve much.
A career exaggerated that of the star, which is now worth 120 million pounds after Hollywood hits including blockbuster films ‘All Mad About Mary’, ‘Charlie’s Angels’, ‘The holiday’ and ‘Shrek’. But in the 1990s, her fate was far from these exploits. “I started working as a catalog model and had enough money to move to Paris and get an apartment, which I shared with a girl who is still one of my best friends. But I’ve been there a whole year and haven’t worked a day”. A very difficult period for Diaz, on the eve of her 50s and returned to acting for the Netflix platform after saying goodbye (temporarily) to Hollywood.
I didn’t have the money for to survive. Then I got a job but, really, I think I was a courier transporting drugs to Morocco – I swear to God. “The shocking revelation is rich in detail.” It was the early nineties and they gave me a closed suitcase locked up with my stage ‘costumes’ inside, I had to go do a fashion job. “Yet when she landed and was ordered to reveal what was in her trolley by the officials, Cameron panicked. “I was a blonde girl with blue eyes in Morocco. I was wearing ripped jeans and wedge boots, with my hair down: I was really scared.” She replied shakily: “I don’t know, it’s not mine, I have no idea who she is.” It was only when she was stopped by a customs officer in a North African airport so that Cameron has realized that she has been deceived perhaps a smuggle something of illegal. “That was the only job I found in Paris.”
Cameron has so left the suitcase – handing it over to the airport official – and managed to get home to Paris. She never really knew what was in that bag, but on reflection she realized that “I was probably handling illegal substances“. Drug traffickers may be jailed for a decade in Morocco, but Cameron did well and a few weeks later she was cast in the film she would introduce her to the world, The Mask.
The following days were, in fact, the spark that ignited his career. Manufacturers of ‘The mask’ they had chosen model and actress Anna Nicole Smith (who died at 39 in 2007) to play Tina Carlyle. But when the director Chuck Russell saw Cameron in front of the camera, insisted on hiring her, explaining how she was “the perfect contrast to comedian Jim Carrey” as Stanley Ipkiss, aka The Mask.