AUSSIE actress enjoys playing strong, sensitive, smart women. RUBEN NEPALES
LOS ANGELES—How does she feel about being tagged as the new Sharon Stone? “My cheeks just flushed a little bit,” admitted Abbie Cornish, in a sexy black jumpsuit, upon hearing that question in our interview at the SLS Hotel. “I haven’t read that,” she said with a laugh. “You are getting a first-hand reaction. How do I feel about that? I don’t know. We have talked about Nicole Kidman and the comparison there. I don’t know, honestly. These things are compliments to me because Sharon Stone is a beautiful woman.”
The woman who grew up on a large farm in New South Wales, Australia, starred in acclaimed films like “Bright Star,” “Candy” and “Somersault.” She also starred in Madonna’s “W.E.,” “Seven Psychopaths,” “Sucker Punch,” “Limitless” and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.”
But Abbie told us that she became a star in her older brother’s eyes only when she landed a role in Brazilian director José Padilha’s 2014 reimagining of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic, “RoboCop.” She plays Clara Murphy, the wife of RoboCop (Joel Kinnaman of TV’s “The Killing”). The rest of the cast is quite impressive: Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton.
“My older brother still lives on the farm,” said the blonde actress who has two younger brothers and a sister, also an actress and a model. “He fishes, he’s got his land and dogs. He’s very hands-on, very earthy. For him, this world feels very foreign.”
Smiling, Abbie recalled, “I call my brother and I say, ‘Hey, I have this gig, this, that…’ and he’s like, ‘Cool.’ Then he talks to me about the farm, the dogs and stuff. But when I called him about ‘RoboCop,’ he was like, ‘What did you just say?’ I said, ‘I’m going to be in ‘RoboCop.’’ He said, ‘‘RoboCop,’ as in the ‘RoboCop’ from the 1980s, the movie that we watched on VHS all the time?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He has never wanted to jump on a plane to America, but he was like, ‘If there’s any movie I’m coming to, it’s that one.’”
“He started the Mrs. RoboCop name,” Abbie added. “He said, ‘You are Mrs. RoboCop?’ All of a sudden, I became much cooler in my brother’s eyes.”
“Joel has a lot of strength as an actor,” Abbie said of the actor who portrays the part-man, part-robot police officer originally essayed by Peter Weller. “I think Joel is the perfect RoboCop because he has a presence about him. He’s tall. He has a great face—it’s so striking.
ABBIE Cornish and Joel Kinnaman play the leads in José Padilha’s reimagining of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic “RoboCop.”
“Obviously, he’s incredibly handsome, but he’s also very talented as an actor because he’s connected—he can take himself places emotionally. He does it in a way that is subtle. He’s interesting to watch because he moves slowly through his work as an actor. He’s very confident on the set. It’s charming and admirable. He’s got a big career ahead of him.”
Of her memories being directed by Madonna in “W.E.,” where she was Wally Winthrop, Abbie said, “Madonna is an incredibly strong woman. Strength is something that Madonna consciously taught me. When I first met her, she gave me a lot of books on Frida Kahlo and Leni Riefenstahl; and books of women who carved their own paths and did their own thing. Madonna obviously has done that herself. So she’s very interested in that. She likes to be strong. She likes to do what she wants and how she wants to do it. She enjoyed imparting that with me.”
“I am totally open to television too,” stressed Abbie, who stars with Tim Roth and Sam Shepard in Discovery Channel’s “Klondike,” which is based on actual events during the last Gold Rush in the late 19th century. “As a script, ‘Klondike’ was so beautifully written,” said Abbie. “To get to play a character like Belinda [Mulrooney] who in 1897, 1898 owned more real estate and businesses than anybody in town—woman, man—and ran it well. She was a worrier.
“So I thought, it was the same sort of thing because there’s a reason why at this point in my life I wanted to step into the shoes of Clara Murphy in ‘RoboCop’ and Belinda Mulrooney in ‘Klondike’—women who are connected, strong, who knew what they wanted in their lives. They were loving people. I mean, Clara is much more sensitive and gentle. Belinda, in Episode 2, you see that side of her—she is a businesswoman, ambitious and driven.
“But it was lovely because I’m 31 right now,” Abbie said. “A lot changes between the ages 28 and 31. To play characters like those was a really nice moment in my life and work.”
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com. Follow him at https://twitter.com/nepalesruben.