“Finally! Some good news!” director Nancy Meyers wrote on Instagram Wednesday, captioning a screenshotted headline announcing that Cameron Diaz would be coming out of acting retirement for a Netflix movie with Jamie Foxx. An action-comedy aptly titled Back in Action, the film marks Diaz’s first onscreen role in eight years.

Foxx revealed the news on Twitter, sharing audio from his phone call with an “anxious” Diaz. “I don’t know how to do this, you know?” she told him. The Oscar winner then enlisted Tom Brady for the call, who admitted he was “relatively successful at un-retiring.” (The NFL player rejoined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers less than two months after announcing his retirement.)

Back in Action reunites Diaz and Foxx, who first worked together on Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday in 1999. Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon is helming the movie, having also written the script with Neighbors scribe Brendan O’Brien. The costars last shared the screen as Miss Hannigan and Will Stacks (a.k.a. Daddy Warbucks), respectively, in 2014’s Annie remake, which marked Diaz’s last feature film.

Diaz’s final year of acting was a major one. She starred in three studio movies—The Other Woman, Sex Tape, and Annie. While promoting said projects, Diaz experienced the industry’s fickle highs and lows. In a year that saw her host Saturday Night Live for the fourth time and earn a spot as one of Forbes’s highest-paid actresses, Diaz won worst actress at the Razzies for two of her three critically panned projects.

For two decades prior, Diaz had made at least one film every year—starting with her debut alongside Jim Carrey in The Mask and followed by lucrative hits including My Best Friend’s Wedding, There’s Something About Mary, Charlie’s Angels, and Shrek. And then—at the height of her Hollywood exposure—she disappeared.

Well, not entirely. In 2015, Diaz married Benji Madden after seven months of dating, and they welcomed their daughter, Raddix, in December 2019. Professionally, she pivoted to wellness—releasing 2013’s The Body Book and its 2016 follow-up, The Longevity Book, both of which center on health and aging. Diaz also launched an organic wine label, Avaline, and has publicly reunited with famous costars such as Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts.

Diaz wouldn’t confirm that she had “actually retired” from acting until 2018, while celebrating the anniversary of her 2002 comedy, The Sweetest Thing. After that, the actor began speaking about why she stepped away. “When you’re making a movie…they own you,” Diaz told Gwyneth Paltrow during a 2020 conversation for Paltrow’s Goop. “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.”

During her time away, Diaz said she had “a lot of relationships I had to repair, a lot of relationships I had to build that were absent in my life.” It’s a sentiment she reiterated while appearing on Kevin Hart’s Peacock talk show, Hart to Heart, telling him that there were “so many parts of my life…that I wasn’t touching.” These included her home, her finances, and “just the management of me as a human being, not me as Cameron Diaz the machine.”

Diaz has also admitted to buying into the “societal objectification and exploitation that women are subjected to” while in the public eye. “Fame is very infantilizing,” she told RuPaul’s Drag Race judge Michelle Visage on her Rule Breakers podcast. “It’s very much about keeping somebody coddled in a state of like, we see a little child and think, It’s so cute, I want it to always be cute, and if I keep it cute by always treating it cute, maybe it’ll stay cute forever. And that’s how people treat you.”

Despite her disillusion with aspects of showbiz, Diaz left the door open for a possible return. “The way I look at it is that I’ve given more than half of my life to the public,” she told InStyle in 2019. “I feel it’s okay for me to take time for myself now to reorganize and choose how I want to come [back] into the world. If I decide to.”

It’s unclear why Diaz has chosen this exact moment to reenter the spotlight. Working with Foxx may provide a safety net, and Netflix could prove an exciting new venture for the actor, who has never appeared in a streaming-service film. (The platform is also the landing spot for Lindsay Lohan’s upcoming return.) Either way, Diaz’s comeback is happening on her own terms. “I got a peace in my soul,” she told Paltrow of her Hollywood hiatus. “Because I was finally taking care of myself.”