Cameron and Her Girls

We know beautiful, blonde actress/environmental activist Cameron Diaz from her fun romantic comedies, as a "Charlie's Angel", as the voice of the ogress Fiona in the Shrek films and, of course, from her romance with Justin Timberlake. This month, she takes on a new challenge. Cameron plays a mom to two young girls in the upcoming weeper My Sister's Keeper based upon the book by Jodi Picoult.

Older teen daughter Kate, played by 16-year-old Sofia Vassilieva from TV's "Medium", is living with cancer and trying to experience the normal teen highpoints; landing a boyfriend, a decent kiss, going to prom, while her younger sis Anna, played by Kit Kittredge's Abigail Breslin, loves Kate a ton but is getting fed up with being harvested for blood and organs as her sister's body fails. You see, Anna was specifically born to save her sister's life! Needless to say, this complicates family relationships.

We wanted to know more about the bond these actresses formed while making the movie and noted that, at our interview, Cameron seemed like an older sis to the two young women, helping them finish their thoughts and making sure they were treated well. It was a real mutual admiration sisterhood! Really sweet! We learned about future projects, challenges while filming, Sofia's journey as she played a cancer patient and, yes, fun on set!

Here's the haps on the cool wardrobe: Picture Cameron with her beach tan wearing skinny pants and a light apple green top with fluffy sleeves, her hair pulled back in a pony tail and accessorizing with big gold hoop earrings. Abigail, now 13, was looking very grown up with a bit of make-up and a cute red and black sleeveless dress with a huge zipper down the front and a cute black bracelet. She was carrying a rubber duckie from her hotel room because 'it was lonely". Sofia was very glam with a short blonde bob and a lowcut teal blue dress.

TeenHollywood: Cameron, this is the first time you're playing a mom, and playing a mom to teenagers is a big step for an actress. Was there any hesitation or concern about going that route?

Cameron: I really don't think about this stuff too hard. [Laughs] I just find my way through it. [Director] Nick [Cassavetes] brought me this script, and it was a wonderful script. I didn't really even think about the fact that I would be playing a mother. I didn't think about it, in terms of what it meant to my career. I thought of what it meant to the story, and who this woman was and what her life experience was and what was happening in front of her.

TeenHollywood: Let's talk sisters. Cameron, you have a sis. Did that help you connect? Abigail, you have brothers.

Cameron: Family is so important. What drew all of us to this story was the family, and the stories of each of these characters. Neither Sofia nor Abigail has a sister.

Abigail: In the movie, my character and Sofia's character, Kate, are sisters, and my character loves her sister so much that she's willing to go to any lengths to help her. That's what I liked about the movie. You think that this family is all in this big problem, which they are, but they all love each other, even though they're going through this whole thing.

Cameron: Reading this script, I think we all related to the fact that there isn't anything that you wouldn't give someone that you love that deeply. You do whatever it takes to keep that person alive. I think that that's something that spoke to most of us, for this film, and what I think is so effective, in the film.

TeenHollywood: Sofia, how did you feel the first time you looked in the mirror and saw yourself as this character (bald and with big under-eye circles through a part of the film)?

Sofia: One day, we were doing a screen test where I'm wearing the wig with the hair falling out and it was the very beginning of it all, I remember I came into the trailer and I was hysterical. It was so hard to see yourself like that, and it was so hard to envision other people going through that, and that's something that happens every single day. The two things that made that moment better were that Cammy and my mom were there, and they both fled in, when I was sitting in that chair, crying.

Cameron: It was so brave of her to do it. She was 15 when she did it. If anybody thinks back to when they were 15 years old, the last thing you want to do is shave your head and then your eyebrows. That's when you're getting a real sense of who you are. It's so formidable. It was very brave for Sofia to do. It was amazing.

Sofia: And, I think that it let me see myself in a different light, being so new and pure, and having a completely fresh start. At 15, I wasn't conformed to any idea of myself.

TeenHollywood: Cameron, can you talk about working with Abigail and Sofia? Was there a specific scene with each of them where you felt like you all really nailed it?

Cameron: Every scene with them. They are really amazing. They're both extraordinary young women. What was amazing about working with Abby was that I realized you see her and you're like, 'Oh, she's just a little girl,' but she's got so much power within her. I went up to her mother and said, 'Your daughter is a warrior.' She just knows how to push through. She can take all these things that are happening around her, that are these very adult, complicated, complex situations and ideas, and she's able to somehow put something behind it with more strength than you see in most people. I was amazed by how strong she is. She's just a powerhouse.

TeenHollywood: And, Sofia?

Cameron: Sofia is the most tender of tender. Everything is right there on the surface, at all times [Sofia appears to be blushing]. You don't want to fall into her depth too deep because you don't where it's going to end. She has such a depth of feeling and emotion. Both of these girls were so generous with me, as actors, every time. Abby was crying off camera, and I was like, 'Sweetheart, you don't have to cry off camera,' and she was like, 'It's okay. I've got it.'

TeenHollywood: Did you meet cancer patients before filming this?

Sofia: I had met with cancer patients and doctors, and visited City of Hope. We all fell in love with a few incredible kids, including Nicole, Paul and Kelsey. They really were there, on a daily basis, to be a guide and a reference point, and lead the way.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about feeling a connection with people who have actually gone through this, and how difficult it will be for someone who has had a family member go through this, or have a personal experience with it?

Sofia: One of my very big concerns, after having met with Nicole [Sofia's cancer patient advisor], was how is this movie going to affect those who have gone through it and who've lived this, day in and day out? She was my guiding light. And so, I sat down with her and said, 'You've been through this, you've seen this, you know this firsthand. How can you go see [the movie]?' And, she looked at me and told me that we'd be telling the story of these people and these families. 'You go do them justice. Don't shy away by hiding it, or being overly kind. I felt pretty confident that we did everything in our power and pushed every line we could to create this story, to honor it, and to create relationships that would make it significantly real and important.

Cameron: All we can do, as actors, is do the best that we can, if we don't actually have the experience of it. Sofia looked like she was dying, but she was a vital, young girl. Same with myself. I'm not a parent, but I know what it is to love, very deeply, something that I wouldn't want to have taken away from me. So, all we can do is just empathize with that. We can only guess what it might feel like, from our own experiences.

Abigail: My grandpa had cancer, so I have had personal experience with it. You just take from what you do know and what you are familiar with.

TeenHollywood: What did all you do in between takes to raise your spirits?

Sofia: Oh, there would be days when we'd have the most powerful scenes of the film and, when we were shooting, we would be going through that, over and over again. And then, we'd cut and we'd be telling ridiculous jokes that I still can't bring up, to this day [Abigail giggles]. So, the strength of the people around me, Nick, Abby, Cammy, Jason and the whole family, was such a strong unit, outside of the film, and they gave me strength.

Abigail: Of course, doing the scenes, there is a certain time where you do have to stay in it, in between takes. There was one scene that me and Sophia did, where her character is trying to take these pills, and I remember thinking to myself, when we were in this dark room for a day and a half, then walking outside for lunch and thinking, 'It's daylight still?' There's definitely a time when you do have to stay in it, but I think that we also managed to [do other things]. Cameron would cook in her trailer for us a lot. She made chili cheese fries, one day!

Cameron: I would ask the kids, 'What do you want to eat today?,' and each one of them got to pick what they got to eat for lunch, for a day. Evan [Ellingson who plays the son in the family] always wanted fajitas, Abby wanted chili cheese fries and Sophia was on a special diet for the whole thing, so I would try to force her to eat stuff that she wasn't supposed to.

Sofia: But, I held my ground.

Cameron: Her discipline was amazing. I had to talk her down from it, a couple of times. I was like, 'After this, it's over. No more discipline like this.' We talked about balance. It's okay to be disciplined for a period of time, but after that, you can still have it in your life, but you can't be so strict. But, she got out of it.

TeenHollywood: Bring on the chili cheese fries! Cameron, your character shaves her head in sympathy with her daughter. Did you actually do that?

Cameron: [laughs] I didn't shave my head. My hair wouldn't be this long if I shaved my head. Don't listen to paparazzi, they know nothing.

TeenHollywood: Cameron, you three seem close. did you ever feel like you really were the mom?

Cameron: The wonderful thing about our job is that we pretend on set and in the film, when we were rolling. But, I would never try to be these two girls' moms. We would hang out with one another, like people who just knew each other, as we did, which was a lot more fun. I don't think they would like me as much, if I was actually their mother.

TeenHollywood: Your mom character is sometimes not so sympathetic. How did you deal with that?

Cameron: When I first read the script, I wasn't worried about how to play somebody who other people might think is so unsympathetic. People might think, 'How does this woman justify doing this to this other child?' You find, at the end, that you really cannot judge her. I don't know what it's like to have a child who's dying. I don't know what it feels like. All I know is that every parent that I've spoken to says the same thing. You do whatever it takes to save your child, period, whether it hurts another child of your own to do so. That is what you do. You jump off a cliff. There's no judgment in this movie, as far as I was concerned.

Abigail: My character is put in a really hard situation, from the day that she's born, where she is giving her sister blood and bone marrow and she doesn't mind doing it. But, when her sister doesn't want her to do it anymore, she has to make a decision about whether or not she proves her love for her sister, or she alienates herself from her family. When I finished reading it I was like 'Wow!' It's a very, very difficult situation to choose between sides. It's hard to think about that.

Sofia: For me, the strength of Kate was to be able to let go and be the first one in the family to say, 'Look, this is going to happen and it's time. It's been 14 years of being sick, and you need to let go.' Off camera, I'd be crying hysterically between every take. You feel for every single one of these characters. You can stand by every single one of them and understand why every person is being the way they are. You can really get into their mind-set.

Abigail: What I found interesting about the movie, when I read it, was that there really are no bad guys. Everybody's doing what they think is right. They're not trying to do anything wrong. They're just doing what they think they should be doing.

TeenHollywood: After making this film, have any of you thought about becoming advocates for people with cancer?

Sofia: I'm an honorary ambassador for Stand Up To Cancer. And, I recently took a trip to Memphis and visited the kids in the hospital, and really learned about this incredible facility, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital that really, surprisingly goes all the way. They don't just care about the child. If you can't cover your medical expenses, they'll do it for you. They care about the family. They don't max out your insurance, so that when something else happens to a family member, you're covered there too. The walls are covered in murals that were chosen by kids, and that they've created. That love and that detail can't go unnoticed. That was really, really empowering for me, to see that and hear the stories of these kids.

Abigail: I went to a Stand Up To Cancer event and I got to actually take calls and talk to some of the people who were making donations. It was a telethon.

TeenHollywood: Cameron, you have been standing up for the environment lately.

Cameron: I think all the organizations that have come to light, in the last decade since we've found ourselves, as a society, riddled with cancer, are amazing. A lot of my focus is going towards environmental thought of what's creating this cancer for our society? What's our overall health and what are we doing to cause this? My focus is more on education of how we can be healthy overall, every day, and hopefully cut out some of these things that might be causing the cancer.

TeenHollywood: The Kate character makes an amazing scrapbook with great pics and quotes about her life. Was that real and on set?

Abigail: It was on set.

Sofia: The journal [scrapbook] is basically what Kate leaves behind for her family. We always have a fear of being forgotten and left behind. She tried to leave everything she could. She tried to teach Anna all the lessons she could, before she passed on, like kissing a boy and all those normal fears of a teenage girl. And, Kate's journal was an extended version of that. It was this life that we've had together, the journeys that we've been on, the memories that we've created that impacted Kate, so she wanted to leave that behind to those closest to her.

Cameron: We made our own journal and put pictures in it. It was just a series of photos that we collected, over the period of the filming. We did some stuff all together and took some pictures on the set.

Abigail: The last day, we did a whole photo shoot at the house. That was actually pretty fun.

Cameron: And then, the wonderful production team created it, built it and put it all together for us. Different artists contributed to it, to create Kate's legacy.

Sofia: There was such detail to it. If you look at the pages, you notice one thing, and then, if you look at it again, you notice another, and everything is connected. Each page is its own story, from one corner to the next, even though it's in pictures and drawings.

Cameron: It was built throughout the shooting of the film, and then we actually filmed the book later on, after we had wrapped the film. That's our movie magic.

TeenHollywood: Can each of you give us a preview of your upcoming films? Cameron, you are continuing with Shrek 4 and The Box with Richard Kelly, which he's described as his attempt at a mainstream thriller?

Cameron: It's more Kubrick-esque. It's coming out in October, and I'd be happy to talk about it when it's coming out. I'm very excited about it, just to have worked with Richard. And, I'm just so honored to be a part of Shrek still. It's a wonderful gift that gives to everyone, and I love being part of it.

Abigail: I have Zombieland coming out in October.

Sofia: I go back to 'Medium' for Season 6, now on CBS on Fridays at 9 pm.