The Force is strong in this one

10 April 2012

People always equate fame with happiness and finding importance in this world,' says Hayden Christensen, 'and that concept is ridiculous. It's... wrong. People who seek fame are deranged'

In a couple of weeks he'll be the most famous 21-year-old on earth. A lean, handsome young man with intense blue eyes, his is the unmasked face of Anakin Skywalker, the young Darth Vader, eventual Lord of the Dark Side, and universal emblem of evil. Soon, Christensen will be a bendy action figure, a computer-game character, the face on the back of every cereal packet on the planet.

This year's contribution to the most successful movie franchise of all time, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of The Clones, was recently billed by its co-star, Natalie Portman, as 'George Lucas's Titanic; it's dark, but a love story'. Which is unfortunate for Leonardo DiCaprio, who also auditioned, unsuccessfully, for the part of Anakin. And even more unfortunate for Hayden, who could now become... this year's Leonardo.

'Well, I never wanted that,' says Christensen, rocking in his seat almost to the point of falling off backwards, 'and I don't understand that. I don't want it.'

Hayden Christensen is a serious actor, with an easy, knowing smile and an intense look which has led Lucas to describe him as 'one of those brooding young Turks, in the Marlon Brando/ James Dean mould'. Canadian, and therefore slightly wry, he prefers 47 words where six will suffice - words such as 'surreality' and 'expositional'. But that could be, he decides, because he's consumed by his current character. Christensen is has just finished his stint in the West End theatre production This is Our Youth.

His character, Dennis, is a dope-smoking coke-head with a passion for complex language. He co-stars with Anna Paquin (The Piano, X-Men) and Jake Gyllenhaal (who stars alongside Dustin Hoffman in the forthcoming Goodbye Hello) as bright, slacker-generation rich kids, who skew reality's banality via words, theft and drugs.

'The play's almost like a Waiting for Godot,' muses Christensen, 'where nothing really happens, but it's more about irony and this lingo they've created in trying to escape reality. It's definitely relevant to today's generation.'

Christensen's career started with a crisp. In 1988, aged seven, he accompanied his older sister, Hejsa, then Junior World Trampoline Champion, to an audition for a Pringles commercial where trampoline theatrics were required. There, he was spotted by an agent, and within months he'd been cast in a series of cough medicine ads. Aged 12, he appeared in Canada's first daytime soap, Family Passions, and graduated on to various low-key TV and film roles while a student in a Toronto 'performing arts' high school.

An outsider to the 'cliques', Christensen preferred 'not being cool', loved 'physical humour' and became 'great at falling down stairs'. An athletic achiever - 'I had a very scheduled approach to accomplishing everything' - he imagined, one day, that he'd win a tennis scholarship, and maybe even Wimbledon.

'Instead, I had some unusual connection to this... art,' he says, puffing away on a Marlboro Light. 'I was managing to progress a lot faster than my classmates. And then I got cast in a big movie and now I'm acting in plays in London. It's almost like that Pygmalion feeling of "maybe this has happened too fast".'

One month after completing the TV series Higher Ground, in which he played a sexually abused teenager with a drug problem, the then-18-year-old Christensen auditioned for Star Wars. He found the prospect so daunting that he threw up on two flights to Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in California, but convinced the director he could play young Darth anyway. Once cast, he spent most of 2000 filming in Australia. The process began with a month's coaching in light-sabre technique - an experience he describes as 'orgasmic'. Then he'd go drinking, naturally, with Ewan McGregor.

'Mistuhr Mah-Gregguhr,' announces Christensen, in a spectacularly spot-on impersonation. 'Ewan I adore, we had good fun. Were we drunk? Aye.'

McGregor personally taught him to work-in-the-blue, 'reacting to things which aren't there'. Then came rumours of a real-life love affair with his on-screen love-interest, Natalie Portman.

'We were playing this... chemistry on set,' says Christensen, 'so I guess it's easy to speculate. My theory on the gossip is, if it's not true, then I'm OK with it. And I've been OK with it. So it's not true.'

What does that mean? Your eyebrows are dancing off the top of your head...

'Yes. Eheheh! Y'know. She's a very beautiful girl, but that doesn't mean I wanna date her. Why are you laughing at me!?'

Because you've turned completely pink.

'No! Obviously you believe these rumours! Which is completely absurd!'

So you're not the Britney and Justin of film?

'Noooo. Never. I don't think it's a good idea to date actresses. Especially when you have to do sequels with them. So I managed to stay away from it. Very mature, I think. Our... our... our relationship was purely professional. Unfortunately. You still don't believe me! And that's fine!'

This year, the 'speculation' in Britain may shift on to Christensen's talent, when Life as a House opens on this side of the Atlantic. He received a Golden Globe nomination for the part of Sam, a goth-punk junkie living with his dying father, played by Kevin Kline (who pronounced Christensen 'intelligent, sophisticated, the genuine article'). In the opening sequence, the pierced and made-up Sam sniffs nitrous oxide and attempts auto-erotic asphyxiation.

During filming, Christensen, who knows nothing of teenage torpor or drug rebellion - other than 'smoking cedar plants' in his back-yard - punched a wall so hard in improvisation that he sustained a hairline finger fracture.

'All my characters have characteristics I don't know anything about,' he notes, 'and that's the joy. Being able to justify their actions, and find sympathy in their wrongs, and understand their accomplishments. After Life as a House I took a while off and tried to remember who I was at the beginning of the film. You obsess, and it's exhausting, to lose your sense of self.'

Regarding his spiralling celebrity stock, George Lucas has advised Christensen: 'Don't embrace it, it'll really make you a disillusioned person.' Regarding the rumour that Lucas recruits handsome young men such as Christensen in order that he can introduce them to his daughters, he laughs and says, 'Well, I've met his daughters. But that's ridiculous. That's a good one, but it's not true.' Today, Christensen still lives at home in Toronto, sleeping in his childhood bedroom. Ask him what his room is filled with and you see George Lucas's advice clouding over him like a spectre of protection.

'Oh, personal stuff.'

What's on your walls?

'Oh, nothin'. Paint.'

Come on. One object!

'A big bed! My room is all bed... you walk in, you have to dive on the bed.'

There are no posters, most definitely, of actors. 'I never really admired actors,' he says. 'I mean, when you're a kid, you admire a hockey player, you wouldn't admire an actor. Why would you look up to an actor? They're not important people. They're pretending. That's why I don't understand fame as it relates to actors. I can understand fame as it relates to a president, or someone who's trying to better a group as a whole, in reality, but not someone who's trying to entertain and take people out of that reality.'

Bono once said: 'Celebrity belittles real life, which is where actual heroism is.'

'Yeah, yeah,' Christensen nods. 'And it inhibits your perspective as an actor, to tell something truthfully. And that's your job, to have some sort of sharing of truth. Actors are observers. They're trying to have an understanding of human sensibility. And how do you have that accurate observation if you regard yourself as someone of great importance? When you're the one constantly being observed, because they view you as a celebrity? It's all wrong.'