The folk behind Back in Action, a diverting new Netflix comedy thriller, knew what they were up to with that title. As the world’s press gathers for junket duties, everyone has had the clever idea of tying those three words to the reappearance of Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. “Helmut from Movie Smash here. Would you say that you too were back in action, Cameron?” That sort of thing.
They have had different sorts of returns. Diaz, megastar of the 1990s and 2000s, retired from acting 10 years ago to spend more time with her family. Foxx, winner of an Oscar for Ray, in 2005, didn’t initially see the film as any sort of comeback. He has been chugging along comfortably enough over the decades. He was great in They Cloned Tyrone two years ago. He published a memoir in 2021. One suspects that Foxx, who appeared opposite Diaz in the remake of Annie, from 2014, was instrumental in luring his costar back before the camera.
In 2023, just weeks after Back in Action finished shooting, he was admitted to hospital with what sounded like a serious condition. Little news got out at the time. But we later learned that he had endured a brain bleed that led to a stroke. In a recent Golden Globe-nominated comedy special titled What Had Happened Was ..., Foxx explained that 20 whole days have been wiped from his memory. He recalls informing a nurse that he was uncomfortable with her bathing him, only to be told that she had been performing that duty for weeks. “I couldn’t wipe my own ass,” he said. “I lost everything, but the only thing I could hold on to was my sense of humour.”
He seems to have made a remarkable recovery. In the comedy special he looks crisp for any fellow born in the 1960s – even one who hadn’t been a cigarette paper’s width from death a year and a bit earlier. He and Diaz join us in busy, josh-heavy form. It could be 2004 all over again. The Athens Olympics are under way. Audiences are enjoying Diaz as Princess Fiona in Shrek 2. John Kerry is preparing to hammer George W Bush in the US presidential election (do I have that right?) And Cameron and Jamie are at the mic. I get the sense that he can’t quite get his emotions into words.
“It feels good,” he says. “The fact that we have a great movie in Back in Action. And to have Cameron Diaz at my side. The support of people saying, ‘Hey, man, we are with you. Make sure you come on back here so we can get it popping,’ so it just feels good. I don’t have a long, elongated explanation. It just feels good to be back in action.”
Nice work, Foxxy. You got the title in there again. Diaz also understands the brief.
“For me, from the beginning, the decision to do it, to come back, to be able to work with Jamie, to make a movie that we’re proud of ...” she says, excitedly. “Just sitting here today now, I feel so privileged and grateful that I get to make movies.”
Well, okay. But fans were maybe a little surprised that she decided to stop making those movies in the first place. Diaz could make a reasonable claim to personify the spirit of the millennium. Born in San Diego, she was raised in Florida and then in Los Angeles, where, if legend can be believed, she was a schoolmate of Snoop Dogg.
She has explained that, though the family weren’t well off, they got by happily enough. She landed a modelling contract at the age of 16. Then, in 1994, she secured the part of Tina Carlyle opposite Jim Carrey in The Mask. The Canadian rubber-face, who also released Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber in the same 10 months, claimed the year for his own. Diaz hit like a doodlebug and has remained in the crosshairs ever since. There’s Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich, Gangs of New York and – her first collaboration with Foxx – Any Given Sunday followed.
Nobody with working senses needs to be told that the industry is harder on women than on men. Perhaps Diaz then didn’t get the roles she deserved. In 2014 she endured two notable critical bombs. Neither that version of Annie with Foxx nor the horrible Sex Tape will soon be receiving retrospectives at the American Film Institute. Still, it had been only a year since she could claim to be the highest-paid woman actor over 40. She wasn’t exactly Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
“I decided to leave because I wanted to live my life differently, you know?” she tells me. “It was just really that simple. I’d been making movies since I was 21 years old. I was 41, and I just thought it was time for me to engage with my life in a different way. I met my husband. We started our family, and that was all I wanted to do.”
Sure enough, in 2015, she married Benji Madden, the elaborately tattooed guitarist from the rock band Good Charlotte, and they went on to have two children via surrogate.
She seems to have kept busy in a variety of areas. She published a book (whose title alone took some writing) called The Longevity Book: The Science of Aging, the Biology of Strength, and the Privilege of Time. She launched an organic wine. RuPaul’s Drag Race was, as you can imagine, happy to have her as guest judge on its All Stars show. Sounds an agreeable life. I’m not sure why she came back to answer questions from Slovenian movie bloggers.
“The only reason I really came back was because Covid had happened,” she says. “We were exiting Covid. It was about a year after everything opened up. My husband and I just said, ‘Maybe it’s time to make a shift for our family. Should we do something different, mix it up?’ And it was really right. This opportunity came, and I thought, If I’m ever going to do a movie again, this is the one I would do.”
I can’t say Back in Action is the sort of film I’d design to lure a legend back from retirement, but Seth Gordon’s romp is certainly a step above recent starry Netflix actioners such as Heart of Stone (that one with Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan), Lift (Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) or The Union (Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg).
Unlike those films, it, at least, understands that it is first and foremost a comedy. Foxx and Diaz play retired agents who, now raising an unaware family in bland suburbia, are dragged, ahem, back in action when an old colleague is murdered on their doorstep. Apparently at odds with Andrew Scott’s dubious MI6 kingpin, they fly to London for speedboat chases past Thameside tourist traps. The kids gawp at parents they hitherto thought boring.
“Jamie was someone who I’ve known for so long,” Diaz explains. “I’d done two films with him. The last film I did, before I stopped making movies, was with him. I thought the talent, obviously, is there. We all know that. But knowing him as a person, and knowing him as a professional, and knowing that I would get the best partner and have the most fun doing this movie made it really easy to say yes. And I’m so glad I did. So, yeah, thank you.”
Foxx heaves his shoulders in acknowledgment.
It feels a little as if we are in the presence of Generation X royalty. If they will forgive me for saying so, Diaz is 52 and Foxx is 57. They first stepped before audiences in the cultural confusion of the 1990s. Before breaking internationally, Foxx was known to US audiences from the TV sketch series In Living Color and his own sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show. Diaz became a star during the first Bill Clinton administration.
They are the last of a kind: coming of age before the internet properly hit, easily old enough to remember the cold war. Foxx’s first child, Corinne Foxx, an actor and producer, was born as long ago as 1994, but he has been negotiating with Generation Z since the birth of his second daughter, in 2009. Diaz’s children (Gen Alpha, apparently) no doubt view the birth of the internet as their parents view the publication of the Gutenberg Bible.
Back in Action has some fun with exactly that generation gap. Foxx’s character says at one point that you get well-rounded kids by lying straight to their face. I assume we’re supposed to process that with an ironically raised eyebrow.
“Do you lie to them?” Foxx says. “That is just another way to say: you protect them at all cost. You protect your kid at all costs. We’re looking at this world right now and it’s already a little weird. By the time they get to where we are now it’ll be weirder. So you just try to protect them at all costs. If you care about your kids you do whatever you can to make sure that these years are the kid years.”
It’s the same for all parents. It’s different for all parents. Foxx and Diaz are caring for children in circumstances unlike those in which they grew up. Born in Texas, Foxx was raised by his mother’s adoptive parents. He worked his way towards fame via a scholarship to United States International University in San Diego. Diaz, of Cuban descent, was also no friend to privilege. Their hunger for success sprang from humble circumstances. There is no easy way of teaching that to children who were born into luxury.
There is also the issue of accommodating their kids to their parents’ fame. The children in Back in Action learn that Mom and Dad were spies. I guess the young Foxxes and Diazes always knew their folks were something special.
“I think they go through what all parents go through: ‘No, I was cool!’” Diaz says of their characters in the film. “I think that’s every parent’s hope and dream at some point – that their kids will believe they’re not just their mom and dad. I have this fantasy this film will be the catalyst for this conversation between kids and their parents – where kids might actually believe their parents did something cool before they were parents. Or just believe that they’re real humans. Because I think that’s the journey of parenting.”
That has to be easier if Dad won an Oscar for playing Ray Charles or Mum got to stand up to Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York.
“You don’t really ever see your parents as human beings until you’re in your late 30s or in your 40s,” Diaz adds. “In your 40s you go, ‘My mom and dad were just human. I get it now!’ That slides the scale a little bit closer.”
These avatars of Generation X find themselves in a Hollywood that is, maybe, a little kinder to middle-aged actors than it once was. Nobody is shuffling Susan Sarandon or Glenn Close off to cheap horrors or afternoon soaps as once happened to former golden-age icons. This comeback should be lasting. Diaz will next be seen opposite Keanu Reeves in a promising comedy about the price of fame from Jonah Hill. Foxx has a new film from Taylor Hackford (director of Ray) on the slate and is directing Gerard Butler and Robert Downey jnr in a basketball comedy called All-Star Weekend.
All such talk is, however, muffled as we speak by awareness of the current chaos in Los Angeles. The fires are still raging. Ordinary working people as well as the entertainment elites find themselves without a home. It seems petty to note that the Oscar nominations have been twice delayed but, given how much attention Hollywood pays to such things, that is a small measure of the devastation in the city. Have they already put their minds to rebuilding?
“There is such a long road ahead,” Diaz says. “I was there for the first day of it in Los Angeles. And I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has. No one has. Not in Los Angeles. There is a long road ahead of us. I think that everybody’s going to be doing their part to help try to figure out the pieces and help to rebuild – whatever that might mean. We don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what, really, it’s going to take. It’s not over yet. There are winds still, you know.”
Foxx adopts a sombre tone.
“We are here doing this,” he says. “But you know how we feel. It’s friends of ours. It’s devastating. So, however you give back, you give energy, prayer. It’s a tough time, and we recognise that.”
Back in Action is streaming on Netflix
