Academy Awards heavyweights such as George Clooney and Cate Blanchett were no match for another of Tyler Perry’s populist tales.

The Lionsgate release Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, debuted as the No. 1 weekend movie with $21.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Perry’s flick came in well ahead of Clooney’s legal drama Michael Clayton, Blanchett’s historical pageant Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg’s crime saga We Own the Night, which all pulled in modest crowds.

TeenHollywood chatted with Abbie about her roles in Elizabeth as well as past films and the upcoming Stop Loss and Bright Star in a recent interview which you can read below. Abbie talks about things from her favorite Bess costume, corsets, co-stars and more, definitely a great read for Abbie fans!

Seems that the first Queen Elizabeth had a lady-in-waiting named Bess Throckmorton who was younger, prettier and who was able to party with the royal courtiers while the frustrated Queen had to behave. In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a sequel to 1998’s Elizabeth, the luminous Cate Blanchett is again the virgin queen but Bess is played by pretty young Aussie actress Abbie Cornish. Abbie came from a farm in New South Wales to model as a 13-year-old then co-star in an Aussie soap at age 15. She played a sex-addicted teen in the racy film Somersault and co-stared with Heath Ledger in Candy, a movie about a drug-addicted young couple. You can see her next year in Stop Loss, the film that started all those rumors about her and actor Ryan Phillippe.

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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.

Following in the footsteps of Nicole, Naomi and other great Australian actresses, 25-year-old beauty Abbie Cornish, Cate Blanchett’s co-star in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, might surprise those who see Shekhar Kapur’s historic epic, because few people will have seen the actress’ amazing performances in the Aussie dramas Somersault and Candy. (A few more people may have seen her in Ridley Scott’s 2005 comedy A Good Year but not too many more.)

In The Golden Age, Cornish plays Bess Throckmorton, Queen Elizabeth’s first lady-in-waiting, who has an affair with Clive Owen’s Sir Walter Raleigh, much to the ire of the queen who also had her eye on the dashing adventurer, and when ComingSoon.net spoke to the young actress recently, we were pleasantly surprised by her eloquent responses to our questions.