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Cameron Diaz reveals to Gwyneth Paltrow why she left Hollywood: 'I got a peace in my soul'

Cameron Diaz is opening up about why she decided to walk away from Hollywood.

In a conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow, which streamed live on YouTube Wednesday, the "Bad Teacher" star discussed her life and what made her decide to step back from acting. Diaz's last credit was in the 2014 film version of the musical "Annie," per IMDb.

According to Diaz, leaving the Hollywood spotlight helped her find peace.

"I got a peace in my soul, because I finally was taking care of myself," she told Paltrow. "It's a strange thing to say. I know a lot of people won't understand it. I know you understand it."

Diaz also described the pressures of the public eye, saying she felt "overwhelming energy" from all the attention she was receiving. Plus, according to Diaz, your life isn't your own when you're a movie star.

In a conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow, which streamed live on YouTube Wednesday, Cameron Diaz discussed her life and what made her decide to step back from acting.
In a conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow, which streamed live on YouTube Wednesday, Cameron Diaz discussed her life and what made her decide to step back from acting.

"When you're making a movie... they own you," she said. "You're there 12 hours a day, for months on end. You have no time for anything else. And I realized I handed off parts of my life to all these other people. They took it. And I had to basically take it back and take responsibility for my own life."

Diaz also described how actors are put in a position "where everything is taken care of for us."

"Actors are infantilized," she said. "Overwhelmingly, your life just becomes so narrow. Everybody's doing things for you, and you're catered around, and I never felt really, truly comfortable with that. That wasn't my comfort zone, to be taken care of."

Diaz said she needed to leave acting in order to become "self-sufficient again."

"I really needed to know that I could take care of myself and that I knew how to be an adult and I knew how to navigate the world of the complexity of being an adult and having responsibility and putting all the pieces of my life together the way that I wanted it to be put together, not how other people thought it should go," she continued. "I said, 'How do I want my life to function? Where do I want to go?' And I'm the architect of that."

Since leaving the spotlight in 2014, Diaz has been building a family. She married musician Benji Madden in 2015 and the couple welcomed their first child, a daughter named Raddix, in January.

Surprise! Cameron Diaz and husband Benji Madden welcome baby girl Raddix

Diaz has been open about leaving her Hollywood career before. During an Instagram Live with probiotic company Seed founder Ara Katz in May, the actress discussed whether she would do more movies.

"I am not going to do more films at the moment,” she said. “But I am doing a lot of Instagram Lives because I think it’s a lot of fun to get to connect with you guys and say hi.”

Cameron Diaz reveals whether she'll ever do movies again after years of retirement

She continued, “Everybody’s out there in quarantine right now, which is really, really hard and discouraging, but it looks like we’re getting the swing of it at least.”

In a 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she announced she was "actually retired." And in 2019, she told InStyle, "I don’t miss performing."

Contributing: Sara M Moniuszko

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cameron Diaz tells Gwyneth Paltrow why she left her acting career