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HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN
The twenty years old canadian is going to be famous - because he is playing Anakin Skywalker in “Star Wars: Episode 2″ (start: 16.05), who once fell in love with princess Amidala (Natalie Portman), before he becomes to Darth Vader.

- His parentage:
At home in Vancouver Little-Hayden had to climb over junkies. what helped him in his first US-Serial as a drugs-dependent teenager likewise his father: “College? For what?” he said. “It gives more important things.”

-His mission:
To prove that the dad was right. First with “Star Wars” , then with Kevin Kline in “Life As A House” (start: 20.06).

-His fad:
Hayden has always got a few simpsons films on him: “They showed me, that it is okay to be a little strange.”

Hayden Christensen

Shattered Glass

Also Starring Peter Sarsgaard and Chloe Sevigny; Directed by Billy Ray (Lions Gate, October 17)

“I never once thought about Anakin Skywalker while we were making this movie,” director Ray says of his star’s other alter ego. Indeed, given Christensen’s performance in Shattered Glass, you can forget those predictions of the Mark Hamill-ization of his career. The film, which recaptures the heady days of the 1990s Internet boom when youth was king, stars Christensen - who earned a Golden Globe nomination for Life as a House - as Stephen Glass, the real-life 25-year-old journalist who fell from grace when his editor at The New Republic (Sarsgaard) discovered that he had been conjuring articles from his imagination. “Originally, for me, it was about questioning information that you’re supposed to accept as fact,” the 22-year-old Canadian says on the phone from Australia, just days before shooting starts on Star Wars: Episode lll. “But then when I started getting into figuring out who Stephen was, it became more about someone who was so desperate to fit in that it pushed his moral boundaries.”

Of course, Christensen knows the perils of a sudden rise to fame; after tooling around in commercials and small parts since he was seven, getting cast in Star Wars: Episode ll - Attack of the Clones set him up for a very unkind critical drubbing. (For the record, his performance as Anakin could see considerable improvement, thanks to a change in the Force. “George [Lucas] is taking a more proactive approach in terms of letting his actors feel as involved as they want to be,” he says of a new on-set rehearsal process. “This time he’s being much more liberal.”) Since Glass wrapped last fall, the film was made even more relevant by Jayson Blair’s similarly destructive behavior at The New York Times. And then there was the real Stephen Glass, who broke his silence in May with a thinly veiled novel about a hot shot journalist who falsifies his sources and falls into disrepute. The book is “a total cop-out,” Christensen says. “Which is, actually, in character for someone who’s not able to tell the truth.” When the actor saw Glass give an interview on 60 Minutes, he was struck by how much his performance resembled Glass’s manner. “It confirmed that I wasn’t making an ass of myself,” he says. “To be honest, it was a huge relief for me.”

Typed by:TinaJ.

Packing For Paradise

A flight of fancy with Hayden Christensen - what more could a girl want? When it’s a romantic getaway to capri, how about lots of white…at least three swimsuits (from bikini to maillot)…and a flounce of tulle at twilight?

Liar’s Poker
Hayden Christensen’s calling card? A smashing turn as the prevaricating reporter in Shattered Glass. Robert Sullivan meets a new Hollywood player.

You have to wonder about Hayden Christensen. In Shattered Glass, Christensen-the-22-year-old actor and, thanks to his role as Anakin Skywalker in the latest Star Wars installments, a movie star the world over - plays an impostor, liar, and fraud, and he plays such a character scarily well. Specifically, he plays Stephen Glass, who, while on the Washington, D.C. - based staff of The New Republic, and while reporting for such titles as Rolling Stone, George, and Harper’s, wrote stories that were praised and applauded but completely fabricated. There was the one about the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ; the one about the computer hackers’ convention; the one about Monica Lewinsky condoms. Steven Glass was a black eye on journalism, and this was in 1998, almost five years before Jayson Blair, of The New York Times, whose crimes of plagiarism look in comparison a little like copycatting.

The result of seeing Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass is that when you meet up with Christensen - poolside at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, at the moment, and ordering food hungrily - and he tells you what he did this morning, you have to wonder: first because he was so good as a make-believe liar, and second because the story sounds a little wild, if not slightly implausible.

The story of his morning starts the day before, after a twelve-hour flight from Australia, where he just finished filming more Star Wars. It involves him driving directly to his brand-new house, which he hadn’t seen before, since his older brother/housemate bought it while he was off in a galaxy far, far away. It includes a drive to a storage space, where he allegedly almost accidentally spent a lock-up evening and a subsequent drive back to the storage space this morning to pick up - get this - a taller than Christensen (six-foot-one) homemade TV. “It’s meant to have every piece of high technology in it, but encased in the most horribly ugly paneling. He just made a TV but didn’t bother with the aesthetic of it,” the actor says…too convincingly? He claims to have been wedged beneath the TV in the rental van at 8:00 A.M. this morning, cheered on by a chorus of honking traffic. “We almost died,” he says, which is difficult to confirm, given that he looks tan and fit and Jedi-Knight healthy in cargo pants and unbuttoned dress shirt, though his T-shirt is fairly sweaty. And the TV is said to have been constructed by his uncle, who Christensen further claims - and this is the part you really have to wonder about, the part that you might be thinking this reporter was making up - also invented the phaser, the ultrafuturistic weapon of choice on the old Star Trek series.

Poolside, Christensen gushes a convincing, nice-seeming-guy nonchalance that makes you want to believe him anywar. “I’m not in a rush. My brother’s unpacking, and I’m in no hurry to get back there.” The phaser story warrants checking, certainly, but before the veracity of his uncle’s claim can be confirmed, let us concentrate on what we know to be true, which is that his performance in Shattered Glass is excellent. As un-action-packed as a drama about a political newsweekly might sound, this film ends up a psychological thriller, elegantly written and directed, by Billy Ray, with Christensen’s performance the glue that keeps you wondering what the truth is about the man with a made-up life. Glass, it will be recalled, was a bright and shining star in the late nineties, a talking head who not only fabricated articles but, subverting magazines’ verification procedures, fabricated sources entirely: Web pages, business cards, voice mails. The film shows that journalism, obsessed with factual accuracy, left a flank open to fraud. But lest you be bored by Fourth Estate policy matters, it’s essentially about office politics, and about how good people might believe - and even support - a not-so-good guy. There’s a “good” boss and a “bad” boss, and the sycophantic egoist who gathers allies and insulates himself against all criticism.

The film shows Glass largely surrounding himself with the female side of the staff. Christensen never met Glass, but in his research for the film, the actor pinpointed women as Glass’s source of power among his truth-jilted co-workers. “He kind of had a group of predominantly female co-workers that sort of mothered him and fed into his - I would call it manipulative pity, almost, where he’s trying to get people to feel sorry for him because he’s so lacking in self-confidence, where you couldn’t help but want him to do well,” Christensen says.

Hanna Rosin, now a Washington Post reporter, was an actual co-worker of the actual Glass; her character in the film is a kind of composite, as played by Chloe Sevigny. (“This is fantasy come true,” wrote Rosin’s husband, David Plotz, Slate’s Washington correspondent. “A Hollywood starlet dressed up in my wife’s clothes, talking sass as machine-gun speed like my wife, and looking as much like my wife as a blonde straight-haired American can look like a brunette curly-haired Israeli.”) “The thing that Hayden pulled off really was that kind of asexual puppy-dog thing,” Rosin recalls, “because that was the game. It was more like, ‘Oh, my son, Steve.’ Particularly in relation with me, my character in the movie. It was a very accurate portrayal of the relationship.”

Despite not being a documentary, the film is scrupulously accurate; the dialogue for a pivotal scene between editor and reporter comes directly from a tape-recorded transcript of Stephen Glass, as recorded by Adam Peneberg, a reporter for the now-defunct on-line publication Forbes Digital Tool. Christensen was equally scrupulous, to the point of startling the New Republic staffers who advised on Shattered Glass when they visited the set. “It was shocking,” Rosin says.

“I was a little worried I’d been set up,” says Charles Lane, The New Republic’s editor during the Glass affair, who showed up on the set in Montreal. “He was eerily similar to the real Steve.” If Christensen is the antihero, then Lane’s character, as portrayed brilliantly by Peter Sarsgaard, it the unlikely and un-liked hero - the not-so-popular boss who comes in after the very popular one: in this case, Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. Indeed, the great achievement of the film is that it makes doing the right thing, even in the stale confines of a bureaucratic environment, valorous. The mundane path is the one worth taking; lies just make a mess.

“Most of the film has a bit of a domino effect of lies, where he just does one to cover another,” Christensen says. “And you know the sad thing is that for the most part you kind of feel like - or I did - that he was perfectly capable of being a fine reporter and not having to make up these really extreme fictitious scenarios.”

If Nixon was the offscreen Darth Vader - esque villain and Woodward and Bernstein the two-headed hero of All the President’s Men, then Shattered Glass reverses the order, in line with the public’s current displeasure with the press, known now as the media - a displeasure caused in part by their telling us what it is we don’t want to hear: deficits with tax cuts, war without WMDs. Shattered Glass has a cautionary feel that it doesn’t really need: The fact is, the press itself did a good job exposing Glass, and, more recently, the Times’s report on Jayson Blair’s fabrications was careful, precise, exact. “It’s about deception and someone lacking in moral integrity and journalistic ethics - or it doesn’t have to be journalistic ethics,” Christensen says. “It’s about someone whose ambition gets the best of them and they lose sight of what they’re actually there to do.”

Toward the close of shooting Shattered Glass Christensen felt a little lie-slicked himself. “I would come to work everyday playing a character who had to lie through his teeth,” he says. Even in the abstract, Glass got to him. “By the end of the film I was really in kind of an insecure place.” As opposed to the place he is now, which, given his poolside conversational eloquence, his mid-house moving poise, his cool scruffiness, seems pretty secure, not to mention surprisingly sports-checkered. In Toronto, where he grew up, he played tennis and might have been a hockey star; until he was sixteen, he played in youth-hockey leagues. He fell into acting only while tagging along with his sister, who was auditioning for a Pringles commercial. He appreared in a commercial for Captain Power, a Mattel video game, and at thirteen he was Skip McDeere on Family Passions, a Canadian Soap. His first film was John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and he subsequently did My Life as a House and The Virgin Suicides. In 2002 Christensen premiered as the young Darth Vader, in the days before he goes to the Dark Side.

It impressed Billy Ray, the director of Shattered Glass, that Christensen would choose to go from pod racing to mere type-writing: “Imagine being as talented and handsome as he is and coming off a movie like Attack of the Clones, and knowing you could choose any role you want, and choosing this character. It says something about Hayden and about the challenges that he likes that he would commit to something like this. What Hayden is getting now is either ‘Who’s this guy? He’s fantastic!’ or ‘We always knew he was really good.’ ”

He may be good, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a lot of work to rehearse a lightsaber fight for a month with Ewan McGregor, a fight that already makes Christensen proud. “I think this will go down as one of the longest fights in film history,” he says.

Then again, if he is in any physical pain today, it is because he’s allegedly been moving the alleged TV built by the alleged Star Trek-phaser designer who he says is his uncle…all of which is second-guessed as un-Glassianly as possible. To wit, How does he know his uncle designed a phaser? “I know that because he’s my blood and I trust what comes out is the truth,” he says. And then, sure enough, if one does a little in-depth Star Trek research later on, one ends up learning the story of a young guy impressing Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek creator, with a phaser replica a long, long time ago at a faraway Star Trek convention (it was only a replica, but still…). You learn that Roddenberry commissioned the uncle of Hayden Christensen to make more of the same for a Star Trek movie. “I’m serious,” Christensen says, and the verification process allows you to believe him; no hard feelings. In the end, it turns out that Hayden Christensen wasn’t making anything up, vis-a-vis phasers or anything else for that matters. In the end, it turns out that life is interesting without lying about it and that Hayden Christensen is totally real.

Typed by:TinaJ.