CATE BLANCHETT BRINGS BACK THE QUEEN

Cate Blanchett reprises her role as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Elizabeth Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett reprises her role nine years later as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, fighting for her throne and for her life amidst her love affair with Sir Walter Raleigh.

Cate wasn’t sure if she wanted to play the Queen again but she connected to the love story which hadn’t been explored before with the dashing Clive Owen as Raleigh.

“Then it became really interesting for me to play because it’s not simply here we go the crusty old virgin is falling in love again. It’s more that she’s made the choice that she is going to use her virginity, her status as a single Queen as a political tool.”

Cate says that Sir Walter Raleigh represented an exciting possibility for love when there aren’t many prospects for a Queen whose commitment is really to her country.

“It was more a wistful precariousness that if only I could be him which I think is a different form of love that often you can fall in love with people that you want to emulate. And somehow to be with them is to live through them, to be inside them and to see the world through their eyes. And the fact that Elizabeth as cultured and as well read and as intelligent and eloquent as she was had never left the shores of England and in walks a hero who has discovered new worlds and has literally been to where the maps end. And I think that’s incredibly exciting for her that finally she could possibly have met her match.”

Elizabeth: The Golden Age opening Friday, October 12th also features Geoffrey Rush reprising Sir Francis Walsingham and Abbie Cornish as her lady in waiting who attracts Raleigh’s attentions as well.