In the six years since Cameron Diaz last appeared onscreen, the actress married singer Benji Madden, became a mother, and launched a “clean wine” brand called Avaline, among other endeavors. During this period, Diaz also casually revealed that she had retired from acting, a decision, she told Gwyneth Paltrow this week, that left her at “peace.”

“I got a peace in my soul,” Diaz said during an interview with Paltrow for Goop. “Because I was finally taking care of myself.”

n the six years since Cameron Diaz last appeared onscreen, the actress married singer Benji Madden, became a mother, and launched a “clean wine” brand called Avaline, among other endeavors. During this period, Diaz also casually revealed that she had retired from acting, a decision, she told Gwyneth Paltrow this week, that left her at “peace.”

“I got a peace in my soul,” Diaz said during an interview with Paltrow for Goop. “Because I was finally taking care of myself.”

“It’s a strange thing to say. I know a lot of people won’t understand it,” she told Paltrow. “But it’s so intense to work at that level and be that public and put yourself out there. There’s a lot of energy coming at you at all times when you’re really visible as an actor and doing press and putting yourself out there. I’m sensitive to some energies and not others, but I do get the overwhelming energy of the attention being put towards me. I stopped, I really looked at my life, and I saw what I had been [missing].”

As Diaz explained, being a movie star left her feeling like a product in her own life. “When you’re making a movie, it’s a perfect excuse. They own you,” she said. “You’re there for 12 hours a day. For months on end, you have no time for anything else. I realized I handed off parts of my life to all these other people and they took it.”

She added, “I had to basically take it back and take responsibility for my own life. That’s my job. There’s a lot of things I had to iron out, a lot of relationships I had to repair, a lot of relationships I had to build that were absent in my life.”

A former model, Diaz shot to stardom almost immediately with her debut opposite Jim Carrey in 1994’s The Mask. From there, Diaz became one of the most popular and successful actresses in Hollywood throughout the late ‘90s and 2000s, starring in blockbusters such as My Best Friend’s Wedding, There’s Something About Mary, Shrek, Charlie’s Angels, and Bad Teacher, among other hits. During that time, she worked with legendary directors like Spike Jonze, Martin Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, Ridley Scott, and Nancy Meyers.