He made his name as the young Darth Vader, but for Hayden Christensen the next year launches his career on a new intergalactic trajectory. The young canuck will find himself sporting Bob Dylan's hat, in the arms of sexy starlet Jessica Alba, surrounded by virgins, and transporting himself around the world in a split second. With such a fantastic future, how will he keep it real?
"I dont want this article to be about how 'Hayden Christensen made me wait around in his trailer all day,' " says Hayden Christensen as he asks me if I wouldn't mind waiting around in his trailer. He's been called back to the set of Jumper, the film he's shooting in Toronto, and he knows that I've been promised more times than the half-hour we've been talking. As he throws on his character's green hoodie and starts for the door, he turns around to offer me another option: If I don't mind hanging out for awhile, I can follow him to the set. Then, at every break, he'll come over to continue the interview. He's concerned that my schedule won't allow for this, that I'll take revenge by depicting him as a prima donna, a negligent interview subject.
After I agree to the arrangement, Christensen flies out the door, promising that his assistant will be back momentarily to get me. Left alone, I have some time to look around the space where Christensen eats lunch and hangs out between takes. It's a remarkably low-rent motor-home, with stained beige carpet, just enough headroom for the six-foot-one actor, and a bathroom that's like a porta-potty, only more cramped - nothing like the pimped-out star-mobile that I'd expect a talent like Christensen to demand.
Christensen could have easily become a conceited superstar by this point in his career. At twenty, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his supporting performance as a drug-addicted brat in Life as a House. At twenty-one, his face was projected on thousands of movie screens around the world as Jedi bad boy Anakin Skywalker in the first of the two Star Wars prequels he starred in. And now, at twenty-five years old, he can turn down multi-million-dollar contracts to play roles that actually interest him instead; he's the lust object of a planet-wide mass of giggling teenage girls; and he's acted opposite some of Hollywood's hottest young ladies. He's even been caught by paparazzi on the receiving end of model-turned-actress Sienna Miller's lips.
And yet, despite all this, Christensen is still just the down-to-earth kid he was before this all happened, when his only dream was to get a tennis scholarship to university and figure out what he wanted to study. No really, it's true. The kid from Markham, Ontario, who became a huge celebrity almost overnight, still hangs out with his high school buddies, says the only place he calls "home" is the house he grew up in, and tells me the most extravagant purchases he's made with his Hollywood millions are a car for his mom and a farm in Ontario where his parents, older brother Tove, and sisters Hejsa and Kaylen can spend time together. Hayden Christensen, it seems, is capable of acting like a self-absorbed, bratty young man only when he's cast as one in a movie.
It's been almost two years since we last saw Christensen on the big screen, having his legs lopped off by Obi-Wan Kenobi's light saber, and Darth Vader's mask screwed on top of his blood-covered face. Some may have been skeptical that Christensen - or his acting career - would ever return from that black plastic prison. Critics and fans were hard on the Star Wars prequels, and especially hard on Christensen's performance. But in 2007, Christensen is back. Including Factory Girl, which released in early February, he appears in four films over the next twelve months, each of them quite unlike the other.
George Hickenlooper, the director of Factory Girl, hasn't even seen Star Wars. Hickenlooper's first impression of the young actor, who he says reminds him of a cross between James Dean and Marlon Brando, came from Shattered Glass, the 2003 indie film that Christensen starred in between shooting the prequels with Lucas. Hickenlooper called Christensen's performance as discredited journalist Stephen Glass "multi-layered and multi-dimensional," adding that perhaps the actor shines more when he's "working with a director who appreciates actors and not, you know, giant space machines." Believing that he had a good role for Christensen, Hickenlooper set out to get him in Factory Girl, a biopic about the tragic life of Andy Warhol muse and infamously drug-addicted sexpot Edie Sedgwick.
Soon after, Christensen was eating at a greasy spoon in L.A. and ran into one of the film's producers, who, at Hickenlooper's bidding, convinced the actor to look at the script. Christensen was immediately interested. But then, what young man with a self-described "Bob Dylan infatuation" would pass up the chance to play the enigmatic, brilliant, icon of cool? Factory Girl was Christensen's shot to play Dylan. Well, sort of.
The film's original script set out to tell the story of a rumoured love triangle between Warhol, Sedgwick, and Dylan that purportedly took place in New York City in the mid-'60s. It's since been altered: the Bob Dylan part has been removed. The sixty-five-year-old reportedly read the script early on, and - through his lawyer - discounted that such a relationship with Sedgwick ever took place, claiming that the film suggests he had a role in Sedgwick's drug-overdose suicide. He threatened to sue if he was represented in the film. Hickenlooper acquiesced, and his official line now is that "Hayden plays a character who is a composite sketch of a number of iconic musicians of that era." This hybrid figure is still involved in a love triangle with Warhol and Sedgwick (played by Guy Pearce and Sienna Miller), still wears shades, and still sports a harmonica rack around his neck. Gone, however, is that distinctive Dylan rasp and the character's name is now Billy Quinn.
Christensen was obviously disappointed by the change, but that didn't stop him from using Dylan as a departure point. In addition to replaying the Dylan tunes he'd heard hundreds of times since he was eighteen years old, Christensen prepared by carefully studying the 1965 Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, and reading Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet who Dylan admired most and who was one of his good friends. Christensen also listened to The Velvet Underground, Neil Young, and Jimi Hendrix - anything that would put him into the mood of the time. He says he enjoyed flexing his acting muscle for once, playing a character role. "It was refreshing," he says, "to have the freedom to make choices, play with my voice, and wear hats and glasses. They're usually like, 'But we can't see you eyes.' "
While Christensen accepts that his fame is at least in part a result of, as he puts it, "someone liking the way my nose sits on my face," he's eager to prove that he's a good actor, not just a good-looking one. "After Star Wars came out, I was offered a lot of bland characters. It's just tough for people to allow you to do something that they're not used to you doing."
After Factory Girl, a small art house film that will likely create lots of buzz, but not huge box office numbers, Christensen steps back into a more commercial genre - the medical thriller. In Awake, he plays a man who is not given enough anaesthetic during open heart surgery, causing him to feel and be aware of what's going on throughout. Apparently, this can really happen - it's called anaesthetic awareness - and moviegoes are being warned by the film's publicity machine that it "will do for surgery what Jaws did for swimming."
That's all interesting, and certainly people will flock to theatres and lay down twelve dollars to be scarred for life, but what may interest red-blooded males most is the fact that, in Awake, Christensen is playing leading man against Jessica Alba. The sexy starlet's chaps-wearing, bar top-writhing image from Sin City is still burned into our memories, and can pleasantly take our minds off anything unhappy - surgery included. In fact, that's exactly what she does for Christensen's character, who escapes the terror of his surgery by retreating back to his memories, when he and his wife, played by Alba, were first getting together.
So how was it playing the romantic scenes with Alba? Polite young man that he is, Christensen analzes it thusly: "The romance in Awake plays an integral role as far as setting up everything that is about to fall apart, and so, everyone, when we were filming, understood its importance and so we gave it its due attention. And, you know...Jessica was very good at - " he pauses, "bekoning a romantic response out of me." I suggest that he's trying to say that Jessica Alba is hot. "Yeah, she's pretty hot!" he agrees, laughing, though you can tell it goes against his nature to be so blunt.
When I spoke with Alba on the phone a few days later, she announced with pride that since Awake was shot before Factory Girl, "Hayden's first real romantic scenes were with me. Other than - I think he had to kiss Natalie [Portman] in Star Wars once." For Christensen's sake, let's hope Alba is able to bekon better romantic dialogue out of him than the unbearably earnest scenes in Star Wars, so he can prove to critics once and for all that he can carry a movie as a leading man.
His romantic follow-up to Alba will be Mischa Barton - the twenty-one-year-old actress recently killed off the teen soap The O.C. - in an historical comedy called Virgin Territory. The film is based on The Decameron, a book of bawdy humour written in the mid-fourteenth century. In it, a group of young men and women tell stories to each other in a Florentine villa while the rest of the continent is perishing from the Black Plague. By the looks of a leaked trailer, Christensen's young female fans will finally get what they've been waiting for - their dreamy hero in a Princess Bride-like story with, presumably, a happy ending. As much as Christensen says he had fun making his first comedy - a welcome break from the anguished characters he usually plays - it's the fourth film in the works that Christensen's most excited about, and which has the potential to make him a huge action star, even bigger than he made it as a young Darth Vader.
In Jumper, set to release in early 2008, Christensen plays a guy who discovers he has the ability to teleport, which is pretty cool, until he also discovers that there's a gang of mean-looking agents - led by Samuel L. Jackson - who can also teleport and are chasing after him. The film will be Christensen's first massive-budget, popcorn-shilling flick since Star Wars, which could be worrisome for someone who claims that, after his two trips to the Dark Side, he wants to "maintain the concept of [himself] as an artist and not as someone else's puppet." But Christensen's not concerned. The reason? Jumper's director Doug Liman, the man who brought us Swingers, Go, and The Bourne Identity, and most recently. Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Before Christensen showed up for our initial interview, I caught a peek at a few pages of the Jumper script laid out on the trailer's small dinner table. I glanced over a scene that opens with Christensen's character meeting another jumper, as the teleporters are known, played by grown-up Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell. The first line of direction has Bell's character urinate on the side of the Roman Colosseum. It's the first thing I ask Christensen about when he walks in, and he laughs as he tells me that scene was added because Bell was goofing around on the set before shooting, pretending to defile the replica of the ancient ruins. Doug Liman thought it was great, so he wrote it into the script. It's the perfect example, Christensen tells me, of why Liman will rewrite on the fly according to what amuses of makes sense to the actors while they're actually performing. As such, he as a reputation amongst actors for bringing out the best in his cast.
For Christensen's part, he seems to have invested his imagination in the role. "I know teleportation is not possible," he tell me, "but if it were, how would that affect you as a person and affect your character traits? Would it make you more introverted?" During most of our time together, going over his career and what it's like to be a big movie star, Christensen speaks slowly, as if he's carefully considering what he's saying as he's saying it. But as we begin discussing the pros and cons of teleportation, he gets excited in a verging-on-nerdy way.
At one point, I suggest offhand that there are times in real life when I'd like to be able to teleport. "Yeah yeah yeah yeah!" he bursts out in reply, speaking suddenly a mile a minute. "Doing this movie you have no idea, I'm really frustrated that teleportation doesn't exist. It's disappointing. I think that's what's fun about it. In a lot of ways, it's everyone's fantasy. More so than flying." Every man, no matter how old, still has some boy in him, and it usually comes out when he's getting excited by some completely useless idea like teleportation. It occurs to me as Christensen's going on about it that this unmediated excitement about the ideas behind the films he works on might just be why he hasn't yet devolved into a smug superstar.
When I pose to Christensen himself the idea that he's a pretty grounded for a young celebrity, he's reluctant to admit it. "Oh yeah? All things are relative," he says. Jessica Alba, who lives in L.A. and might know a thing or two about the topic, tells me, "He's so warm and loving and sweet. And not an egomaniac or egotistical or anything like that...these are a lot of actors out there - they like to be famous and they like to feel like movie stars and all that, and it doesn't seem like that's what Hayden's goal is." George Hickenlooper calls Christensen a personal friend, and says he's "a really wonderful, sweet, sincere man. Very down-to-earth." However, it's Kevin Kline, who Christensen calls a mentor from their days filming Life as a House, who best describes how Christensen manages to keep the rotten side of fame at an arm's length. Speaking slowly to get his words exactly right, Kline says of his friend: "He's a regular, not to say he's not extraordinary and special, but...he's a man. He's not some kinf of aberrant, artsy-fartsy, self-absorbed, phonym pathetic, neurotic, attention-seeking...what's the word - freak. I mean, he's the real thing."
THE SET OF JUMPER I HAPPEN TO SEE -
a recreation of the labyrinth beneath the Roman Colosseum, located inside what looks like a giant airplane hangar out by Lake Ontario - is so massive that I couldn't catch sight of Christensen when he was shooting, save from a tiny eight-inch screen that Liman used to watch footage. And though I did have to wait, sometimes for long stretches when I wasn't allowed to make any more noise than the sound of my own breathing, Christensen kept his promise, bolting over everytime Liman yelled "cut" to find a quiet corner and answer my questions. He did this despite the fact that the scene he was shooting on that day, in which Christensen's and Bell's characters first meet, was a crucial one. He did it despite the fact that he's swapped spit with some of Hollywood's sexiest starlets, makes wads of money, and is starring in four feature films in the span of one year. He did it, quite simply, because Hayden Christensen is no self-absorbed, bratty young actor. Jessica Alba sure appreciated it, and so did I.
