Bright Star's Ben Whishaw on Jane Campion's Stare and Abbie Cornish's Mix CDs

You're physically immobile for a large portion of your performance. For an actor, when you have your movement and stage business reduced to that degree, does it provoke you in any way?

To do the sick stuff?

When your performance is just your face and your voice. Right now, you're curled up on the couch as you talk to me. You're obviously used to expressing yourself physically.

It's an interesting question. I don't know. [Long pause] I never felt totally immobile, really. It wasn't my experience of playing the character, even when he couldn't move or was in bed. It didn't feel that limited, or at least, I wasn't aware of it that way.

So much of this film's success relies on your chemistry with Abbie Cornish, but is there anything you can or did do to augment that?

It's kind of a mysterious thing to me. Really, either chemistry is there or it isn't, and there's nothing you can do about it if isn't there. I do think it's a mysterious and intangible thing, because sometimes something can happen onscreen between two people that isn't happening in reality, and likewise, we all know that sometimes there's something going on between two people in real life and we don't see it at all onscreen. All I can say is that I know when I met Abbie, for a day or two we were like cats, wary of each other. Trying to sniff each other out. Once we'd gone through a little of Jane's rehearsal process, we very quickly were in tune with each other.

What did Jane do to tease that chemistry out?

Jane would encourage us to look out for each other and take care of each other and to love each other. What we did in rehearsal was that she wanted us to bring in a love offering every day. It could be a letter, a poem, a flower, or a piece of music...but we had to express our love for each other as often as we could through some sort of gift. That was a really clever thing for Jane to do, and it did kind of foster an attitude between us.

Do you two still have each other's love offerings?

I don't know whether she's still got mine, but I've got some of the things she gave me, yeah. [Laughs] Like a CD she made, and she did some sewing for me.

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