Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the story of Elizabeth I’s reign, but many other characters get a chance to shine. Clive Owen makes Sir Walter Raleigh his own, and Abbie Cornish stands out as the queen’s confidante, Bess. She serves the queen, but has her own personality.

“For me there was always a sense that Bess is very good at which she does,” said Cornish. “Obviously, to be in that position. I always felt like the true Bess, she protected herself. I always felt that her inner child was kept underneath the corset. There were many dreams and thoughts that she had which I don’t think she freely expresses to the Queen. The Queen has a sense of them because she herself is human, but Bess maintains constantly around a Queen and so I guess for me there was a separation. Bess’s involvement with the Queen was first and foremost work, and second of all compassion and love. But there’s only a certain extent that you can give over to that love and compassion to someone else when ultimately at the end of the day they can behead you or send you off into the outer world, which at that point in time was a completely different life. So I think there was an attachment but also a sense of self.”

Now that Elizabeth: The Golden Age has been released in some parts, reviews are pouring in. Unfortunately from what I have come across, the reviews seem to be quite bad, granted not as bad as one could imagine, but still it seems the second coming of Queen Elizabeth didn’t quite live up to expecations. :/ Hear are some of the less harsher ones, and I have scanned the two page review in the October 19th issue of Entertainment Weekly, view those here.

From - Entertainment Weekly
In the midst of all this 1980s-style Masterpiece Theatreism, meanwhile, one young performer sticks out as a reminder that Elizabeth: The Golden Age is, after all, a picture also made with a concern for today’s younger tastes in self-actualization. As her majesty’s royal favorite, Bess, Cornish (soon to appear in Stop Loss opposite Ryan Phillippe) comes across at every moment as a modern girl testing her girl power. Peach-toned and Australian like Blanchett, and poised in E2 for larger future fame the way Blanchett was in E1, the 25-year-old Cornish is a star with Now appeal synthesized into a production no longer sure what it wants to say about Then.