Cameron Diaz is June’s Vogue cover girl. The pictures are lovely, and the interview is somewhat boring. Cameron spends most of the time talking about her new film, My Sister’s Keeper, and being environmentally-conscious, which, to Cameron’s credit, she manages to do without being preachy. She doesn’t even directly address her relationship with British model Paul Sculfor, perhaps because they have already broken up. That point in the interview is when Cameron is talking about how much she loves New York, having recently bought a home in Manhattan after living in Los Angeles for years. The writer points out that if Cameron loves New York, perhaps a move to England isn’t far off, to which Cameron replies “I was just really thinking, I can’t be away from New York. I’m having a major love affair with it right now.” Yep, they’re probably broken up.

Cameron primarily talks about My Sister’s Keeper, which from the description of the plot, seems utterly depressing. It’s about a girl dying of cancer, that girl’s sister (played by Abigail Breslin) and the mother of the two girls (played by Cameron). It’s probably a tearjerker. Cameron talks about how her father died during the film shoot, and how that affected her. She also covers the “sex symbol” label, and how that’s not what she aspires to. Here are the highlights from the interview:

[Cameron’s] clearly not looking to be a poster girl for the environmental movement. She is there for the environment if it needs her, buying carbon offsets with no great fanfare, making ecologically sensitive shopping choices quietly and happily. She is trying hard not to preach or scold. Of her Prius she says, “It’s just a car.” She has had one for years, before they became (her dream come true) popular. “It’s just a choice people can make.”

What she is eager to talk about on the road is, quite naturally, her new film, out this month. It’s called My Sister’s Keeper, and if you were to describe it in a too-fast kind of way, you might say it is about the death of a child.

“It’s about falling in love,” she says, eyes on the road. “It’s about all different kinds of love. Parents falling in love with their children. Children falling in love with their parents. Falling in love for the first time. Falling in love with being a teenager. All of the things that you fall in love with, that our hearts give way to over a lifetime, and then the heartbreaks when those things get taken away.”

It sounds like too much for one film, but the director, Nick Cassavetes, has taken what might be a melodramatic courtroom drama and fashioned a rich portrait of a family as it responds to a child with cancer. Abigail Breslin plays Anna, the dying girl’s sister, who narrates the film. Anna is eleven and has endured years of medical procedures to prolong her sister’s life. Anna was conceived as a genetically engineered child, a bone-marrow-donor match (something that is in fact medically possible today). As the film opens, she questions her role as her sister’s life-support system. Cameron plays her mother, a fierce attorney who has given up her practice to concentrate exclusively on Kate, her older daughter, who is dying of leukemia.

With My Sister’s Keeper, she appears to have gone above and beyond the call: During filming Cameron’s father, Emilio, died. He was young, just 58, when he died suddenly of pneumonia. The film shut down for a short time, and then she returned to work. “I think,” Cameron says, “emotionally.…” She pauses as she dwells on the psychological impact the film had on her. “It definitely took its toll. Definitely.”

“New York is the best city in the world, no doubt about it. No other city possesses what New York possesses,” Cameron says. [The] paparazzi-scarred actress (she has successfully sued the National Enquirer and The Sun and had a famous altercation with paparazzi while dating Justin Timberlake) deftly keeps the talk to larger love affairs. “I was just really thinking, I can’t be away from New York. I’m having a major love affair with it right now.”

“People who put labels on themselves limit themselves,” she says. “If you are a woman who’s been labeled as a sex symbol, for instance—I mean, I am not saying that’s the label people would apply to me. But if you see yourself that way, inevitably you get to a point when you are no longer a sex symbol. And if you can’t move past that, you’re putting a limit on yourself; you’re arresting your development. And that’s where I think a lot of women get in trouble.”

“It’s a journey,” she adds in a mock-heavy stoner accent. “It’s a total journey.” After the laughter subsides, she goes on. “But it’s also true. I mean, I’m not 25 years old anymore, nor do I want to be. I wouldn’t even want to go back to being 30. You know what I mean? That journey—I’ve done it already. I don’t want to do it again. It’s a lot of work to get through it, and I am excited about moving forward. I think that people get caught up in getting back to some place that they already passed. Or to a place where you cannot stay.”

[From Vogue Magazine]

That whole “sex symbol” part of conversation threw me. I guess she’s saying she was never a sex symbol, because she knew it was limiting? Or is she saying some people considered her a sex symbol, and she found that limiting? Back in the day, I know that guys really liked her, and she was hot stuff around the time Something About Mary came out, but was she an honest-to-goodness sex symbol? I always had Cameron pegged in the Sandra Bullock-esque “Tomboy/Girl-Next-Door” category. Which is just as limiting as the “sex symbol” stuff. But I will give Cameron a lot of credit for never whining about aging in Hollywood, like so many actresses seem to do these days. Cameron’s approach to her age always seems to be “this is where the party is, right here”, and that really works for her.

Photos are from Style.Vogue.com, where they have many more.