Ever cheerful, Cameron Diaz goes bad

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Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

After 17 years of winning over moviegoers with her breezy confidence and wide smile, one of Hollywood’s consummate charmers has had enough. Cut the charisma and cue the contempt: It’s time, finally, to loathe Cameron Diaz.

As an unrepentant moral scourge in her new film “Bad Teacher,” Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey — an educator who steals, cheats, lies, sleeps in class, smokes pot in the school parking lot and swears like a trucker, often in red pen remarks scrawled on the work of her middle-school students. Dumped by her sugar daddy, Elizabeth’s goal is to make enough money for a pair of breast implants that she thinks will help earn her the affections of another meal ticket, a teacher with a trust fund (Justin Timberlake) who’s as mild as she is wild.

Thirty pages into reading the script, Diaz says she thought she’d pass. Instead, she made a conscious decision to try something new.

“I’m trained as an actor to look for a character to be someone at the end who people like. Reading this script, I was thinking, there’s no way out of this for this girl,” Diaz says. “She does so many things that are so selfish and narcissistic and closed off. How can she be redeemed?”

In person, Diaz, 38, is perky but guarded, and fond of the word “amazing.” The script? Amazing. Her co-stars? Amazing. The set? Amazing. But the indefatigably cheerful actress confesses she found a certain liberation in Elizabeth’s dismal disposition.

“Her disdain for life is one that I relished playing,” Diaz says. “I’m such a cheerleader, it’s kind of fun to play a character who thinks everything sucks.”

And then, you realize, she’s doing it again: Playing rotten and R-rated, Diaz may make us like her even more. Which is exactly what “Bad Teacher” director Jake Kasdan had in mind.

“She’s probably the only actress of her generation that people are actually excited to see behave this badly,” Kasdan says.