Cameron Diaz enjoys behaving badly in “Bad Teacher”

LOS ANGELES — In “Bad Teacher,” Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a middle-school teacher who does mostly the wrong things, mostly for the wrong reasons. While she’s not exactly a role model, she is a humorous character to watch.

“I’m not judging,” Diaz said at a news conference promoting the film at the Four Seasons hotel. “But the thing about it is that, if we believed this was the right thing to do, we wouldn’t be making fun of it. Right? So it was really fun to make fun of it. Because clearly, especially living in this town, we all know what it’s like to come up against people who have their priorities a little screwed up and focus on the wrong things.”

Halsey plans to lure a rich man into marrying her so she can live a life of leisure. When watch fortune heir Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) becomes a substitute at the school, Elizabeth sets her sights on him. But when she sees a picture of his ex-girlfriend in a bikini, she decides she needs to make certain cosmetic enhancements to land Scott.

“It’s called hard economic times, have you ever heard of this? You can’t find a millionaire like the way you could like three, four years ago before the crash,” Diaz, 38, said. “So it’s like a lot of work for her now. It’s an investment.”

That investment? Breast enhancement surgery.

“She’s working hard for those,” Diaz said. “She knows to get what you want, you have to have a goal. And her goal is to invest in her ‘business’ and get a pair of (breasts).”

---