ComingSoon has an interesting interview with Elizabeth: The Golden Age‘s Geoffrey Rush, in which he mentions his co-star Ms Cornish a few times. Here are the selected quotes concerning Abbie. Click on the link above to read the entire article about the fantastic actor.

It’s been ten years since Australia’s Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar for his first leading role in the biopic Shine, and a few years later, he followed that with a pair of Oscar-nominated period pieces, Shakespeare in Love and Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth

Geoffrey Rush is one of those rare breeds of actors who can read the back of a cereal box and be interesting, so getting a chance to interview him was more than a small thrill for this ardent fan.

CS: Did you shoot a lot more scenes that actually ended up in the movie?
Rush: By memory, no, there was one key scene that slightly augmented the watchful eye that Walsingham must have been keeping on Bess Throgmorton that didn’t make it into the final cut, but you know, I sort of trust Shekhar and certainly Jill Bilcock, the editor. I did mention it to them, and they said, “Rhythmically, it sort of became a piece of embroidery that disturbed part of the flow,” ’cause they had five or six major converging plots constantly on the boil in this story. It seemed to me like very judicious and very thoughtful pruning.

CS: I rewatched the original movie last night for the first time in many years, and I was surprised by how consistent the two movies are.
Rush: Yeah, I loved that shot when she’s watching Walter Raleigh and Bess dance the waltz, and you get that slice of Cate back in the youth of the Queen. It’s a very poignant and telling bit of film I think.

CS: Did you shoot a lot more scenes that actually ended up in the movie?
Rush: By memory, no, there was one key scene that slightly augmented the watchful eye that Walsingham must have been keeping on Bess Throgmorton that didn’t make it into the final cut, but you know, I sort of trust Shekhar and certainly Jill Bilcock, the editor. I did mention it to them, and they said, “Rhythmically, it sort of became a piece of embroidery that disturbed part of the flow,” ’cause they had five or six major converging plots constantly on the boil in this story. It seemed to me like very judicious and very thoughtful pruning.

CS: You talked about Cate being tentative about coming back. Back when she did the original movie, she was very new but now she’s recognized as one of the top actresses in the world, so was it very different working with her this time?
Rush: No, no. On the first film, certainly it was only the second film I’d done outside Australia, and I think for Cate, pretty much the first one she’d done outside. It was kind of her entrée into a bigger international stage, and in some ways, that was quite a useful quality to work on. I think it also raised the stakes for her, because being a relatively unknown Australian actor, taking on this classic iconic English figure sets up a challenge, which I think Cate as an actress truly, truly met. As you can see from the repertoire of the things she’s done since, she’s bringing a greater kind of practical experience that I’m sure helps inform the mind of the Queen in this sequel.

CS: You also have Abbie Cornish in this, who you worked with on Candy and she’s almost in the same place where Cate was on the first movie.
Rush: Indeed.

CS: Did you put a good word for her in with Shekhar or was he already familiar with her two or three movies?
Rush: To be honest, I can’t remember how that happened. I would have shot Candy in the beginning of 2005, I think, or it might have been 2006. It’s a bit of a blur, because in around and that, there was many, many, many commute visits to the Caribbean (chuckles) and I didn’t keep an accurate diary. But Shekhar very much keeps his ear to the ground. He’s aware of finding fresh dynamic talent that he thinks may be great for an audience to make discoveries with somebody rather than seeing a familiar face. He was in Melbourne recently, we hung out a bit down there, he was a guest at the Melbourne Film Festival, and he made a comment in the paper, he said, “I just find it intriguing. I watch all the Australian films,” he said, “Because to me, they are the major English speaking country in the Southern hemisphere and they’re so far from everywhere that I believe it creates a greater sense of adventure in its actors.” They’re willing to travel and they have to travel a long way to do something and that seems to spark their engines much more.