Prepared for Takeoff

What happens next to Hayden Christensen is likely to be a bungee jump into the unknown, so the young actor is enjoying his last moments on the ground.

Cast as Anakin Skywalker in the next two “Star Wars” movies and with buzz mounting about his performance in his first feature film, “Life as a House, “ Christensen is standing on the edge of something so daunting he has yet to fully grasp it.

“It’s a little scary just that my face is going to be everywhere,” the unassuming 20-year-old said in a recent interview over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, wide-eyed and staring at his hands. “I’ll be drinking a Pepsi out of a can that will have my face on it. That’s not really why I signed up to do [‘Star Wars’], and when I took the part I never really contemplated what the whole loss of anonymity meant.”

When he was selected by creator George Lucas to play the role that will take viewers from Jake Lloyd’s young Anakin in “Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace” to the Anakin-turned-Darth-Vader, voiced by James Earl Jones in the three earlier films, Christensen’s acting portfolio consisted of little more than a handful of roles in made-for-TV movies and a lead on “Higher Ground,” a Fox Family Channel series.

Yet the soft-spoken and articulate Christensen had a natural charisma, Lucas says, and his acting ability overrode his inexperience.

“He’s charming and he’s young, but at the same time, he’s got a real nice edge to him,” Lucas said. “He’s one of these slightly brooding young Turks in the Marlon Brando/James Dean mold.”

The same comparisons are repeatedly invoked by directors and actors who have worked with him. Christensen, they say, has a combination of unfazed professionalism, on-screen magnetism and a talent for portraying genuine raw emotion that is rare in actors his age. Yet off-screen, Christensen remains a shy, grounded young man as the Oct. 26 release of “Life as a House” approaches. Oddly enough, his brazen performance may be the one that launches him, long before even the trailer for “Star Wars, Episode II--Attack of the Clones” is released.

“He’s had a limited experience and yet he was mature as you can find an actor to be--understanding his character, his character’s relation to other characters in the film and in his performance,” said Irwin Winkler, director and producer of “Life as a House.”

Like Lucas nine months before him, Winkler passed over more seasoned actors in choosing Christensen for the role of Sam Kimball, an emotionally deadened, self-loathing 16-year old who reconnects with his dying father (Kevin Kline), his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and his own feelings.

“When we read Hayden, as the reading was going on, I noticed that Kevin was glancing over to me in a kind of ‘Who is this kid?’ way,” Winkler says. “It was a signal between two people that we found somebody truly exceptional--and Kevin fell madly in love with him.”

A lanky, unadorned blond, in the film he plays a punky Goth with jet-black hair, a chin piercing, two earrings in each lobe and cakes of blue shadow over his eyes. In his opening scenes, Sam goes through his daily routine of getting high on nitrous oxide, then masturbating while asphyxiating himself with a green karate belt tied to the closet bar. The bar breaks and he falls to the floor in an altered state.

Now that his mother has remarried, Sam feels abandoned by his father--who lives alone in a shack on an ocean-side cliff. He hides his insecurities and builds a mask for himself, Christensen explained.

“Every day on set I would go to work and either scream, yell or cry my heart out. It was an exhausting part to play, just very emotionally demanding, and I was physically exhausted,” he said, noting that his weight dropped from 165 to 140 pounds on a diet of “salad, vitamins and water” to play the pill-popping teenager. Christensen is about 6 foot 1.

“It’s not something that I appreciated doing, but every ounce of agony that I went through I could use for motivation for Sam. So I was going out to the set every day laughing, enjoying myself in that sense, but I was in a very bad place with Sam,” he added.

Kline said the “natural actor’s intelligence” of his co-star helped him avoid potential traps in the role. “He could have played Sam as a whiny, overly entitled kind of pain ... but in fact he had this deeply conflicted pain--and [Christensen] can convey tremendous psychic and emotional pain eloquently.”

The “Life as a House” part was not Christensen’s first experience portraying an emotionally torn young drug user. The actor cracks a smile at the suggestion that he’s drawn to characters with deep internal conflict.

Raised in Toronto--where he entered a drama program as a means to getting into the province’s top academic high school (“I couldn’t draw or dance”)--Christensen moved to Vancouver after graduation to play recovering addict Scott on Fox Family’s one season of “Higher Ground.”

With the show set in a school for troubled teens in the Canadian wilderness, his character--the object of incest--was a “good kid, the football captain” with a “damaged vulnerability,” according to the show’s creator and director, Matthew Hastings.

“When Hayden first walked in the door--this may sound a bit contrived in Hollywood and all--but there really was a sparkle to him, and I was just praying that this kid could act,” Hastings recalled. “He came in, a bit shy, and said ‘Look, I just had these lines faxed to me today, a couple of hours ago, and I haven’t had enough time to look at them, but I’ll give it my best shot.”’

“Well, his best shot blew us away,” Hastings said. “He was able to convey emotions that affected us in a very real way--it felt really genuine, and that’s a quality Hayden has.”

In the middle of his eight-month stint in Vancouver, Christensen twice had to reschedule his auditions for “Star Wars,” delaying his first 30-minute meeting with the film’s casting director in Los Angeles for about a month. In January 1999, again unable to join a dozen other candidates for the role, he found himself pulling up to the huge Skywalker Ranch compound in Northern California for an individual meeting with Lucas.

“It was just him and Robin Gurland [the casting director] and myself, sitting in a room talking, and George sizing me up,” Christensen said, noting the informal conversational style heightened rather than relieved his anxiety. “It wasn’t like any regular audition I had ever had. We weren’t reading lines from a page. It was just about my experiences with acting, my training, my thoughts on different places in the world--he was just trying to get an idea of how I was as a person more than anything else.”

Nerve-wracked and “smitten by the experience,” the Canadian returned again to the ranch after another two months for a screen test with Natalie Portman, Skywalker’s love interest in the film.

It got a bit rocky. “I lost my voice on one of the tapes,” the actor said. “We were doing the screen test and halfway through the scene, my voice just went away for some reason.”

“I was so nervous I believe I threw up on both plane rides from Vancouver to San Francisco,” he says with a chuckle.

When his manager called to announce that he had gotten the part, he was a bit taken back but quickly accepted, undeterred by the possibility that it was “too much too quickly” and by the reality that it would unalterably project him into the public eye.

“A lot of me said, ‘Maybe this is too quick,’ but at the same time it was not a role I was going to pass on or [be] willing to give up,” Christensen said. “If they call you up and say, ‘Hayden, we want you to mend some of the costumes on the film and we’ll let you play one of the extras in one of the bar scenes,’ you say, ‘Thank you so much, this has always been a dream of mine.”’Within 10 weeks, Christensen, who had never left the continent before, found himself on location in Sydney, working alongside Ewan McGregor, Portman and Lucas, while continually studying up on his character’s history by scanning the series’ Web sites and watching the original trilogy and first prequel every weekend.

With the previous actors portraying Anakin and so much information available in “the public domain,” as the Canadian likes to say, Christensen said much of the groundwork and parameters for his character had been set before he reached the audition--a fact that added pressure to “get it right,” though without the emotional investment and creation of a role like Sam.

The buzz--albeit short-lived--around Christensen that Lucas created when he announced his casting in May 2000, four days after the actor’s 19th birthday, also garnered Christensen several immediate offers for roles in independent films and landed him dozens of auditions. Flying back from Europe after principal shooting wrapped, Christensen recalled being greeted in New York by his manager with more than a dozen scripts. “You dream to have your job consist of either working or reading scripts and picking and choosing,” he said. “When it actually happened, it was, one, very exciting and, two, challenging and stressful ... because you really have to take the time and not go after work that you can get, but rather find stories that have fully realized characters and decide ‘Will it fit in before ‘Star Wars’ or after ‘Star Wars?’--there are just a lot of things you have to think about.”

Noting that “no one is prepared” for the scrutiny that accompanies such a large production as “Attack of the Clones,” Lucas said he and his staff are “trying to bring [Christensen] along in this process so that it is as painless as possible, but no matter how you do it’s kind of overwhelming.”

Although Christensen is “very confident about his ability and talent,” Lucas added, “he gets nervous about this publicity part, which is something you can’t control on any level--and it’s an intrusion into your private life and what you are and unfortunately defines you in ways that you would rather have be more personal.”

Christensen got his first taste of what’s coming during the shoot in Australia.

“It was just like weird happenings every day: going to the store and having this guy follow you around with a camera,” he said. “I couldn’t get mad at them, and I couldn’t really have any impression of it at all. It’s what it was, very bizarre and very surreal.”

As for rumors and gossip that bubbled up, his tactic was to focus on his work and ignore the rest. This worked until he saw his photo in a Sydney paper and”really, my heart dropped,” he recalled. “I had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth, and that’s how my father found out that I was smoking.”

He’s been spending the months since “Life as a House” wrapped in February at home in Toronto, where Christensen can still ride the subway in peace.

Although Christensen, who may be overwhelmed in coming months, “does not exude that sort of thick-skinned cynicism that one would see as able to withstand media assault,” Kline said, he doesn’t see him taking it to heart.

“I think he has the intelligence and sophistication to know what all that stuff means, and he won’t ascribe more value to it than what is deserved or necessary,” Kline added. “It’s not like he thinks he has learned it all and is now coasting on his personality. I think he is a real actor.”

Heading to next May’s launch of “Star Wars,” Christensen sees “Life as a House,” “possibly one more film” and a start in theater as strong foundation to dispel any doubts.

Starring in a “Star Wars” film “doesn’t ensure that you get a career out of this,” Lucas noted. “It takes a lot of movies and a lot of different characters for you to establish yourself--not only as a great actor, but as someone with the charisma and star power that turns you into a so-called movie star.”

But, Lucas added, “I think Hayden has the talent and the drive to accomplish that if he keeps his eyes on the ball.” *