March 10, 2002
Christensen is a buffet of tics: he picks at his chin, tugs at the tongue of his boots, absently kicks at the coffee table in front of him. A few years ago, Christensen experienced an adolescent growth spurt that morphed him from the smallest kid in his junior hockey league to what he is today, a lithe, 6-foot-1-inch man with long, reedy fingers and an unwieldy pair of arms he seems unable to stow comfortably. His face, though, retains the dewy look of a child, endowing him with the odd overall aspect of an angel on stilts.
Christensen is in London rehearsing for his professional stage debut as Dennis Ziegler, the surly pot dealer in the West End production of Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 slacker drama ''This Is Our Youth,'' which also stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anna Paquin. Getting the part -- like beating out every young actor, Leonardo DiCaprio included, for the ''Star Wars'' role, as well as getting a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of a troubled teen in last year's ''Life as a House'' -- is the kind of surreal achievement that would cause most young actors to gather up the Hilton sisters and a sack of drugs and wrap a Porsche around a telephone pole in unhinged celebration. Christensen's success, though, seems only to have heralded a two-year era of coughing and bouts of nausea. First there was the anxiety during his two trips to Skywalker Ranch to interview with George Lucas for the ''Star Wars'' role. ''I puked going there both times,'' he says. More recently, it has descended into his lungs, in the form of bronchitis, which he suffers from today. ''I've gotten it three times in the last four months,'' he laments. And the British interpretation of America's favorite home remedy has been a complete bust. ''I've ordered chicken noodle soup so many times over the past week because I've been sick, and gotten so many interpretations of what it should be,'' Christensen says, shaking his head as though puzzling through a great mystery of the universe. ''A lot of them have had the bone. I don't know if people over here just really like sucking on that afterwards. I just don't know.''
What he does know, however, is that all this illness is just part of acting, something he takes very seriously. ''It's kind of become a ritual that every time I have to go to work, I get physically sick right before we start production. It's some sort of psychosomatic problem I have, just the anxiousness of wanting to get into your work.''
For Christensen, it's always ''the work.'' Though he looks like a kid who might have been abducted from a mall by a casting agent and slapped right on the big screen, Christensen evinces a brooding commitment to his ''craft,'' as he earnestly calls it. After finishing ''Attack of the Clones,'' he took the role in ''Life as a House,'' Irwin Winkler's modestly budgeted weeper. Though critics panned the film, Christensen was praised for his performance as Sam, Kevin Kline's glue-sniffing son.
Christensen and his older brother, Tove, recently set up their own production company, Forest Park Pictures, so they can trawl for exactly that type of script, ''small in scope, character-driven pieces.'' And perhaps in a few years, maybe he will finally find time to have some fun. But don't bet on it.
''I think I work harder than anybody else my age,'' he says matter-of-factly. ''Not to sound conceited, but I just don't meet anybody in the industry that I work with who is so devoted to always being in that mind-set of character.''
Apparently, Natalie Portman, who reprises her ''Phantom Menace'' role as Queen Amidala, found herself included in that group of laggards at times. Christensen would take the task of playing Portman's on-screen love interest (their union will eventually produce Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia) to Actors Studio extremes. ''I don't want to make it sound like he's difficult to work with, because he's not at all, but he's very focused,'' Portman says. ''Hayden would get mad at me occasionally for not taking something seriously enough. There were scenes where the entire take would be us walking up stairs, and he would be like: 'You're swinging your arms too much! You're not taking it seriously! You're not walking the way your character would walk!' I would get all pissed off at him and be like, 'It's not your place.' But he would be right.''
Achievement and discipline have never eluded Christensen, nor, it seems, any member of the Christensen family of Toronto. Tove still holds the Canadian record for the fastest mile for a junior athlete; his sister Hejsa was for a time the junior world champion on the trampoline. His father, David Christensen, a software developer, attended college on a football scholarship and enjoyed all the privileges of being a star athlete on campus. ''He sort of wanted that for all his kids, and so he made sure that we were all pretty competent at our respective sports,'' he says. Christensen excelled at hockey and was nationally ranked in tennis. ''At the time, I was a little resentful of it, but it was probably a good way to spend my childhood,'' he says, perhaps not sounding entirely free of resentment.
At 7, Christensen was spotted by a talent agent when he accompanied his sister to her agent's office for a Pringles commercial. Soon, Christensen himself was doing commercials, coughing for the camera in a Triaminic cough syrup ad and shooting at the television screen for an interactive video game. He attended the Arts York drama program in Unionville, a suburb of Toronto, and immersed himself in acting.
Two years ago, right before graduation, he was offered a part in a Fox Family Channel series, ''Higher Ground,'' playing a druggie teen who is sexually involved with his stepmother. Rather than going off to college, Christensen took the part, which was not a popular decision in his household. ''My father wouldn't really talk to me for a few days,'' he says.
Now Christensen's tasks are bigger than television boilerplate. The kid who was born four years after the original ''Star Wars'' was released, and who has a vague recollection of his brother's Millennium Falcon toy, gets the task of bridging young Jake Lloyd's huggy-bear-with-a-bowl-cut Anakin Skywalker in ''Phantom Menace'' to the point that by ''Episode III,'' Skywalker dons the scary black helmet and becomes his ''dark side'' alter ego, the fearsome Darth Vader. All the while fending off mobs of doughy, middle-aged Jedi junkies who make a habit of showing up, crazy-eyed, wherever he does. Recently in Los Angeles, he was chastised by a middle-aged man when he was unable to sign an autograph. ''So there was this 50-, maybe 60-year-old man, cursing my name, screaming, 'I came all this way just to get your autograph!''' Christensen says. ''I don't want to say that that was sad, but, you know, it's not what I want to be doing when I'm 50.''
Nor does he want to be doing what Mark Hamill, the first boy wonder of ''Star Wars,'' is doing at 50, which appears to be very little.
When asked about the Hamill curse, a Yoda-like smirk spreads across Christensen's face. ''You see 'Corvette Summer'?'' he asks, referring to Hamill's disastrous ''Star Wars'' follow-up. ''I don't really think there's a Mark Hamill plague. I think there's a I-don't-really-know-what-I'm-doing plague.'''
Sweat it not, young Skywalker.
