The Next Anakin Skywalker Shows of His Acting Chops in Life as a House.
With Life as a House, 20-year-old Hayden Christensen has accomplished that rarest of feats for up-and-coming actors: he’s proven he can act. But at the same time his fame has skyrocketed in a way we haven’t seen since moviegoers went ga-ga for Matthew McConaughey well before the release of A Time to Kill. Run Christensen’s name through the Google search engine and you’ll be inundated with over 100 fan sites, including the notoriously-named Hayden Christensen Estrogen Brigade. So who is this guy? If you know his name, it’s probably as the luckiest actor in the world — the guy George Lucas cast as Anakin Skywalker in the next two Star Wars films, the boy who beat out DiCaprio for the role. But his star may rise before anybody even sees the preview for Episode II: Attack of the Clones, because Christensen’s performance in Life as a House is already generating loud Oscar buzz and drawing comparisons to James Dean.
The film is about an architect (Kevin Kline) who learns he is terminally ill and chooses to spend his last days carrying out his dream project: building his own house. When he enlists the help of his ex-wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) and estranged son (Christensen), the house becomes the vehicle for the shattered family to reconcile. Christensen transformed himself for the role — his character, Sam, is a drug abuser, a sometime prostitute, a major Goth fashion victim, and he’s got enough piercings to make St. Sebastian cringe. The troubled teen couldn’t be more different from Christensen himself, who took classes at the Actors Studio, attended one of the top high schools in Toronto, and grew up playing hockey and tennis. The actor lost 25 pounds for the role, subjecting himself to a diet of, as he has described it, “salad, vitamins and water.” The third of four children, Hayden stumbled into acting when he tagged along with his sister to her audition for a Pringles commercial. While there, he got — cue the magic word — noticed. An agent asked him, “Do you want to be in commercials?” He started doing commercials at the age of nine, did a few made-for-TV movies, then landed a part on the Fox Family drama “Higher Ground,” an acting commitment that twice forced him to postpone his audition for the role of Anakin Skywalker.
When he finally met with Lucas, the Star Wars auteur simply sat and talked with him, got to know him, before asking him back two months later to read opposite Natalie Portman. (In Episode II, Anakin and Portman’s Queen Amidala engage in a little interstellar romance.) “I was looking for someone who was charismatic, boyish and likable, yet someone who had the ability to turn bad in the next film,” Lucas has said. “Hayden is young and charming, but at the same time, he’s got an edge to him.” It’s an edge that was sharpened for Life as a House, which Christensen shot after Episode II, returning from that movie’s Australia set to find a pile of scripts and offers waiting for him. Like Anakin, the role of Sam was a hot prize: director Irwin Winkler interviewed 75 actors, beyond the hundreds who merely auditioned. But when Winkler saw Christensen read with Kevin Kline, “I noticed that Kevin was glancing over to me in a kind of ‘Who is this kid?’ way,” he said. “It was a signal between two people that we found somebody truly exception — and Kevin fell madly in love with him.” Shortly after the Anakin announcement, Christensen appeared on “Entertainment Tonight,” seemingly cornered in a parking lot, giving shy answers in what must have been his first interview. Since then, his public persona has been quickly spit-shined and he now makes the publicity rounds — from Leno to Cosmo to the New York Times — with the efficiency of an old pro. The sudden spotlight comes with a price, of course. While shooting Episode II in Australia, a paparazzo photographed him smoking a cigarette. When the photo ran in a Sydney paper, Christensen said, “That’s how my father found out I was smoking.”
Source: Moviefone.com
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