Hayden Christensen's star quality stretches from 'Star Wars' to the Colosseum, but his distaste for its trappings means he doesn't prance around his ranch, writes Donald Clarke
Imagine for a moment that, at just 26 years old, you have already appeared in two of the most successful films of the past decade. You are blessed with healthy good looks. Your bank account fairly bulges. The synapses of the internet buzz with chatter about your new haircut or supposed romantic fling. And this week, your latest picture - a science fiction romp called Jumper - goes on general release throughout the planet.
If this were you, you would, surely, allow yourself to strut and prance like the proudest cockerel in the pen. Yet Hayden Christensen (for it is he) comes across like a terribly nice, terribly intelligent teenager who has just been dragged down from his bedroom to say hello to his parent's aged dinner guests.
"Well, to be a little self observant, I am a shy person," he says. "You know, I start this interview feeling very privileged that somebody like you is interested in talking to me. But getting together with people I don't know and talking about myself isn't what I enjoy doing most."
One can understand why Christensen might feel cautious about meeting the media. His is a very singular class of fame. In 2002, then still reasonably obscure, he was selected for the role of Anakin Skywalker (later to become Darth Vader) in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the second of George Lucas's three prequels to a certain popular space opera. There are few bodies quite so tirelessly obsessive as the International Legion of Star Wars Nutters and Christensen's turn was, duly, debated in tedious detail across the internet. Many unkind words were typed. Some particularly horrid correspondents, troubled by the supposed woodenness of his delivery, dubbed the young Canadian Mannequin Skywalker. The devotees were more impressed by his performance in the subsequent Revenge of the Sith, but the memory of those unkind comments must still give him occasional cause for unwelcome reflection.
"Well, you know, to this day I still don't own a computer," he says. "Now that is not so much a result of staying away from all that gossip as it is a function of my rebelling against my dad. He is a software developer and, as a result, there were always computers about the house. This was the closest I got to rebellion." So producers have to actually get some underling to send him hard copies of scripts and memos? "Yeah. I tell them they'll just have to print it up. I still like having a notebook and a pen. I like the tactile thing of actually writing something down. Don't get me wrong. I understand the appeal of the internet. But I am still to get on that bandwagon."
LET'S TAKE HIM at his word when he says that his avoidance of the internet has nothing to do with a desire to shut out the chatter surrounding his own fame. There can, however, be little doubt that Christensen has little time for the celebrity lifestyle. When not appearing in movies or plays, he now spends time on a farm a short distance from his home city of Toronto. Vanity Fair has not been invited to photograph him feeding the goats or mending holes in the cowshed. He is yet to market Anakin's Butter or Christensen's Hickory Bacon Bits.
"Yes I spend a lot of time there," he says. "I can drive a tractor. The whole thing has become really appealing since I got myself a plot of land. I just take it as it comes. I have a dump truck which I haven't got out of third gear yet and my family get to visit a lot."
Christensen has done a very good job of keeping any romantic attachments out of the newspapers. Some years back, vague gossip emerged concerning a liaison with Sienna Miller, and a few websites have suggested that he once (gasp!) held hands with Rachel Bilson, his co-star in Jumper, but the actor has, for the most part, managed to evade the attentions of the supermarket tabloids. Is there a trick to it? "You know, it's really not that hard," he says. "People who are over-exposed in the press - and the tabloids in particular - tend to moan about it. They imply they don't have a choice. Well, get yourself a farm. The paparazzi won't follow you to a farm, I assure you."
Listening to Hayden's pleas for a quiet life, you can't help but wonder why he went into the business in the first place. If he'd taken up a career in, say, insurance or plumbing, the issue of media intrusion would never have arisen. It transpires that his entry into the world of acting came about largely by accident. When he was about seven or eight, Pringles Crisps approached his sister, a trampolinist of great talent, with the idea of filming a television commercial.
"So they told her she had to get an agent," he says. "The agent saw me and because Canadians are polite felt he had to ask me if I'd like an agent as well." Christensen, who had, to this point, toyed with the notion of pursuing a college tennis scholarship, went on to enjoy a modestly successful career as a juvenile actor. He appeared in a Canadian soap opera entitled (what else?) Family Passions, then picked up a small role in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides and a larger one in the showy melodrama My Life as a House. Everything changed when Lucas plucked him from several thousand applicants to take on the role of Anakin. Delicately featured, but possessed of a strikingly deep voice, he never seemed entirely at ease among the talking lizards and kung-fu dinosaurs. It wasn't so much that he was a bad actor - trained at the renowned Actors Studio, he has indisputable presence - it was more that he wasn't the right sort of actor for the material. Still, the films made millions.
"I never gave much thought to the consequences of taking the role," he says. "I was doing it to oblige my agent - they told me I looked the part and therefore could get in the front door. It seemed way too far-fetched to take seriously. I showed up at the first meeting just happy to be there. I got to go to Skywalker Ranch, where George Lucas works, and I got to meet Natalie Portman. That was all exciting, but it wasn't until George had whittled the candidates down to a few actors that I began to take it seriously." Given his fear of the limelight, did he ever consider turning the role down? "Oh no. I'd have to be honest and say that never crossed my mind. Hey, here I was just out of high school and I was being offered a part in Star Wars. I suppose I tried not to think about all the other stuff that would come with the role. It was all overwhelming."
Since Revenge of the Sith closed the Star Wars saga, Christensen has taken care to balance commercial projects with productions on a smaller scale. In 2003 he delivered a terrific performance as Stephen Glass, a disgraced reporter on New Republic magazine, in the clunkily titled Shattered Glass. Last year, he appeared as a version of Bob Dylan named the Musician - the old codger threatened to sue if the film-makers were any more specific - in Factory Girl, a fitful biopic of Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick. Now we have Jumper, in which Hayden plays a youth with the power to transport himself through space. In the course of the film, he gets to sit on top of the Sphinx's head, has a dust-up in the Coliseum and hangs from the minute hand of Big Ben.
"I do love to travel," he says. "I pretty much live out of a suitcase anyway, but this was a great opportunity to work and see the world at the same time. The script arrived and it has all this action in the Colosseum, so I immediately wondered what that meant. After all, a lot of the time this stuff is done on computers these days. Well, we didn't get to sit on the Sphinx - there's regulations about that. But we actually did get to travel everywhere."
Despite his distaste for the seamier side of show business, Hayden Christensen does appear to be enjoying himself these days. He recently set up his own production company and is currently developing a film focusing on the mistreatment of allied prisoners by the Japanese during the second World War. So, what ambitions does he have left to fulfil? "Well, quite a few, but no specific ones relating to acting," he says. "I dream a lot about my farm. I want to put a landing strip on it. I want to explore Canada in a float-plane. I think a lot about livestock and the various things I'm going to grow on the farm." And with that humble comment he shuffles bashfully out of the room.
What a polite boy. He should go far.
• Jumper is on general release