The Abbie reign of 2009 is beginning! Our beautiful Aussie is gracing the pages of Esquire magazine’s October issue. She’s featured as “The Woman We Love”. She looks incredible in this new shoot! Check out the shoot in the gallery and read the article after the cut.

First she steals your eyes, then she steals the movie. And not to be too graphic, she works her tail off.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Esquire (2009)

She steps out into the brilliant blue light of a Malibu afternoon wearing flip-flops and a diaphanous little black sundress, a look suggestive of a young woman on holiday, a role she loves to play above all else, to hear her tell it. Like so many of her fellow Australians, her wanderlust seems almost genetic, an inbred need to see something more of the world, someplace else, as if to confirm its true existence. She leans against the railing and searches the horizon, the array of lean-muscled surfers in the middle distance, her honey-colored eyes behind green-tinted aviators, the breeze touching her golden, flyaway hair. She talks about soaking up sun in San Sebastián, on the Basque coast of Spain; of Morocco’s sensual dichotomy between light and dark; of living in an empty house in a village in Brazil with two male friends, sleeping in hammocks, studying the martial art capoeira. She drinks Asian “bubble tea” from a plastic cup, compliments of her publicist. There are tapioca pearls at the bottom; they rise in single file through an overlarge straw, her lips the naked pink of an ingenue.

At twenty-seven, Cornish is perhaps most widely known for contributing to the breakup of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, with whom she costarred in (and from whom she stole the last third of) Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce’s Iraq war tale. One of five children raised on a 170-acre farm in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, the former Aussie TV star has been praised as an actress since the morning after her first public performance, at age fifteen, a guest turn as a paraplegic on the down-under series Children’s Hospital. Like generations of precocious actresses before her, she never looked back.

Often touted as the next Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts, often described by directors and producers as “luminescent,” she is a naturalistic indie actress wrapped inside the skin of a sex kitten, Chloë Sevigny meets Scarlett Johansson. Playing Heidi in 2004′s Somersault, she is unnervingly convincing as a young runaway, trading her innocence for necessity and love. In Candy, as a heroin addict, she holds her own against a powerful performance some critics have called one of Heath Ledger’s finest. Even opposite fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Cornish manages to steal your eyes at times. Playing Bess Throckmorton, the angelic lady-in-waiting who falls for the charms of Clive Owen’s lusty Sir Walter Raleigh, she is light and radiant against the dim gloom of the Virgin Queen’s castle.

Next for Cornish is Jane Campion’s latest, Bright Star. With her hair dyed brown, her charms swaddled in an entertaining assortment of oddly whimsical period costumes as befits her fashion-obsessed character, Cornish portrays Fanny Brawne, the eighteen-year-old muse to the young poet John Keats. While living next door to her family between 1819 and 1820, the ill-fated, tubercular Romantic master produced his most beautiful and enduring works, including “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

Cornish has just flown in from Vancouver, where she has begun three months of training for her next movie, Sucker Punch. Cowritten and directed by Watchmen‘s Zack Snyder, the film costars Vanessa Hudgens and is listed as an adventure fantasy. After two period pieces, Cornish says she’d been hoping to do something physically demanding, something for which she had to train, “something really trippy like a concept film, where I’d have to really use my imagination and do crazy things.”

Now she’s busting her butt five days a week, five to six hours a day. “Mixed martial arts, fighting, swords, weapons, choreography, personal trainers,” she enumerates proudly, the beguiling accent of a proper sheila. “We add gun stuff at the end of the day.”

Moving a bit stiffly, she takes a seat at a patio table, in the shade beneath an umbrella. There are bruises visible up and down her (luminous) arms and legs. She reaches again for her Moroccan-mint-blended green-tea boba, from a little café she loves. When she arrived at the interview, she’d found it waiting. “It was funny to want to do that kind of movie and then it just comes along,” she says brightly, and then she takes a lingering sip. The beads of tapioca flow in single file. It makes her smile.

Source: Esquire