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NEW YORK -- At this point, movie audiences have seen Cameron Diaz sing karaoke twice -- very badly in My Best Friend's Wedding, and currently with aplomb in the surreal romance A Life Less Ordinary.
So how is her mike technique, really? "My friends know," laughs the blonde, blue-eyed former teen model. "Before My Best Friend's Wedding came out I ran into some friends who said 'Oh, come with us we're going to karaoke!' "
Diaz had spent days shooting and reshooting the scene where a scheming Julia Roberts sets her up to embarrass herself with her crowlike voice. "And obviously they had no idea about that. I was like (makes snorting-laugh). Before I was done, I broke the karaoke machine. Somehow I'd picked the hardest song to sing, thinking it was easy. Billy Joel's Big Shot. I'm like 'Hey I know the words!' And it was like, 'No, you know the chorus, Cameron, you don't know the words.'
"There's all this stuff in the middle, 'the Halston dress and your hair, dadadadada.' Which goes like, so fast you can't follow it at all. And it's different when you're singing it yourself and you don't have, like, Billy Joel singing it with you.
"Somebody had to start singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow real loud so they could pull me out of there. My friends were like, 'We don't know her, she's not with us.' "
Of course, Diaz's temperature has since changed -- as per her spot on the cover of Rolling Stone's "Hot Issue." After years of being "The Girl" in films from The Mask to She's The One, she held her own as the sympathetic bride-to-be in one of the summer's biggest hits. Socially embarrassing moments to which she's prone ("I'm pretty agile in a gym, just don't take me to a china shop") will now be noticed by more people.
"That's what I was thinking when I saw the Rolling Stone cover. I was walking in New York and I go 'Who's that?' and then it was 'Yeah, okay, now more people are going to know who I am.' " And after My Best Friend's Wedding broke big, her first hint of its success came in the supermarket where "someone just stared at me with their mouth open."
But isn't this what every young actress is after? What did she want? "I wanted to be famous, dahling, so I could date race car drivers," she says with a laugh.
In fact, she's involved with actor Matt Dillon. "Yeah, we like each other a little bit," she says coyly. You may even see them bring their chemistry onscreen. "We're looking for something to do together, but we haven't found anything. It's got to be the right thing, really, especially if you're in a relationship. It doesn't need that kind of pressure."
A Life Less Ordinary director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave) cast Diaz as Celine, the spoiled daughter of a billionaire industrialist, who accidentally-on-purpose gets kidnapped by a laid-off janitor (Ewan McGregor). On the road, she bullies him, berates him and then falls in love with him. "They gave me shots of testosterone before filming," she jokes.
For his part, Boyle has no concerns about how Diaz will deal with her sudden status as girl-of-the-moment. "I think part of the reason Cameron and Ewan hit it off so well is that they both come from close families," he says. "They're both loved, and very centred." (Diaz was raised in Long Beach, Calif., by parents "with a great sense of humor." Her looks come by way of a Cuban-American dad and a mom with English, German and American Indian heritage.)
So what's up next for Cameron Diaz? Well, what worked once just might work again.
And no, it's not another karaoke scene. "I'm getting married again," she says, "in a movie called Very Bad Things. Peter Berg directed and wrote it. It's basically about a bachelor party gone awry. A prostitute is killed and they decide to dispose of the body, then they come for the wedding and have their breakdowns. My character's having none of that. It's the happiest day of her life, damn it.
"It's very dark and very cynical and therefore very funny."