If you think Cameron Diaz was handy with that, um, hair gel in There's Something About Mary, wait until you see her skill with a blunt object in Very Bad Things. Ouch!

Very Bad Things brought Diaz through Toronto recently on a promo tour.

The actress has the #1 comedy of the year under her belt in Mary and another outing in the gross-out laughs genre in Very Bad Things -- in which she plays an obsessive bride-to-be who will do anything to ensure she has a perfect wedding day, and that anything includes homicide.

Complaining cheerfully about fatigue and wishing aloud that she had her comforter with her, Diaz curls into a chair at a downtown hotel. Two black comedies back-to-back, she says, is coincidence.

But not too surprising. Diaz is funny and highly energetic in person. Julia Roberts, her co-star in My Best Friend's Wedding, calls her exuberant.

"I've always made people laugh," Diaz says, not immodestly. "My mom is still the best audience. It's just so natural."

Since her debut in The Mask, a film she auditioned for as a joke, Diaz has appeared in 11 movies in four years.

And she was picky about it, backing off the 'babe' roles after The Mask to polish her skills in films such as A Life Less Ordinary, Feeling Minnesota, Head Above Water, She's The One and My Best Friend's Wedding.

"You can keep the ball rolling," she says, of working so hard, "But it's a matter of discipline. You have to remind yourself to take it easy. Making movies is not easy," she states. "It's fun, but it becomes so complicated."

The steps from model to screen babe to serious actress to comedic genius are not, says Diaz, part of any plan.

"It wasn't about me, anyway," she states, tossing off her success by adding that her film choices had to do with learning and working around actors and directors she admires.

To put this as kindly as possible, Diaz is unlike most others in the model-turned-actress category. For one thing, she can act. For another, she seems smart.

For yet another, she is comparatively unselfconscious. As she once put it, "I'm not going to kill myself because I walked around half the day with a booger hanging out of my nose and nobody told me. I don't care."

Diaz, 26, grew up in Long Beach, California, where she developed a taste for heavy duty rock and held her own with the local toughs at her high school, who, if they hassled her, got pounded.

Co-workers will tell you she drinks like a sailor and eats like a truck driver, rolls her own cigarettes, shoots pool and drives like a maniac, albeit a highly skilled maniac. Dermot Mulroney, also in My Best Friend's Wedding, has said he will never get into a car with Diaz again.

Bobby Farrelly, who directed her in There's Something About Mary, describes Diaz as being darn close to the ideal woman, and his brother and co-director, Peter Farrelly, worries that Diaz fears fame.

All she says about celebrity is that she's learning as she goes along -- there's no handbook.

"I take it one day at a time. I'll probably make a lot of stupid mistakes and embarrass myself," Diaz notes cheerfully.

The actress, who recently split with Matt Dillon, explains that once she's finished a movie, that's it for her. When she sees the finished product in a theatre a year later, she always thinks, "Now I know how I should have played that role. If only I'd known then what I know now." She sighs in mock consternation.

"Just like life."


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