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.”

In 2018, during an interview pegged to the anniversary of The Sweetest Thing—one of the many beloved comedies Diaz headlined in the 1990s and 2000s—Diaz called herself “actually retired.” But until this week, she hadn’t actually detailed her reasons for stepping back from acting.

“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.

But alongside the lauded work (which included four Golden Globe nominations), Diaz said she was left feeling too coddled by the industry apparatus.

“Actors are infantilized,” she told Paltrow. “We’re put in a position where everything is taken care of for us. You go to set, everybody wants to carry your bag and you’re not allowed to do anything—God forbid something happens to you, then they can’t finish the movie and you’re already on film.”

She added, “You’re responsible for all these multi-million dollar pictures that you have to go out do your press for and market and all these things. It’s like, overwhelming. Your life becomes so narrow. Everyone is doing things for you, and you’re catered around. I never felt really truly comfortable with that.”

Part of leaving acting behind, Diaz said, was allowing herself to grow up. “For me, I needed to become self-sufficient again,” she said. “I really needed to know that I could take care of myself, that I knew how to be an adult, that 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 I wanted it to be put together—not the way other people thought it should go.”

Assuming she stays retired, Diaz’s last performance will be as Miss Hannigan in the 2014 remake of the musical Annie.

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