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Hayden Christensen, Superstar
When hormones invade boyhood, they set in motion a physical change whose outcome is unpredictable. Noses, jaws, lips, brows, Adam’s apples and eye sockets all grow larger and not in unison. As a result, all teenage boys spend a couple of years looking pretty homely. But not Hayden Christensen. No, sir. Christensen won the genetic lottery, transforming seamlessly into a darkly dashing young man by the age of 17. This, in turn, helped him win a second lottery – the most anticipated casting call of the last hundred years – when George Lucas chose him to play Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. the young Darth Vader, in the last two Star Wars prequels, garnering him a staggering amount of fame and fortune. When Fame = Having Your Face Plastered All Over Junk Food Packaging The truth of the matter is that fame doesn’t really come with a price; it just grabs you, throws you off the deep end and watches to see if you can swim. “I remember the first time I went into a convenience store after Star Wars II came out,” Christensen recalls. “I walked in and saw my face on a bag of chips. Then I realized my face was on every bag of chips in the store and on every pop bottle. I had to turn around and leave. I didn’t even buy the thing I’d gone in to get. It startled me.” This from a guy who’d started acting in commercials at age seven but kept it a secret from friends well into his teens. “I was a hockey player and then a tennis player,” he says. “I was embarrassed about the acting. I felt it wasn’t jock enough.” So perhaps it’s no surprise that he has been keeping a pretty low profile since Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith was released in 2005. To make matters worse (well, at least for other men), he’s grown even better looking. Now 26, he has shed the last of what little baby fat he carried, leaving him with perfectly chiselled facial features and a lithe, lean body that moves with more grace now than when it was caught up in the frenetic action of light sabre duels. He has two films slated for release this year and another one in 2008. (His most recent, Factory Girl, has already come and gone from theatres.) But what has him most excited is a new personal project. A Boy and His Farm Implements “I recently acquired a farm north of Toronto,” Christensen announces, “and I just bought a big excavator and a dump truck and a bobcat – construction toys. I plan to start building soon. I can’t wait to go out there and move dirt and get my hands dirty.” He bought his heavy-duty vehicles at an auction in Southern Ontario, where to his immense pleasure the people were far more intent on ogling gear than celebrities. “It’s currently a hay farm, but I want it to be a working farm. I want to fill the barn with livestock. First pigs, then cattle and horses.” The property features an old red brick farmhouse that he describes as a “heritage building.” He intends to keep it but also wants to build a new residence. He’s had plans drawn up for a library, a home movie theatre and a kitchen with a fireplace. “I think I’m responding to a desire to have a place that is personal, serene, away from the beaten path,” Hayden says. “And I’ve never had a place of my own for collectibles and things I’ve acquired in my travels.” (He had been keeping stuff in his parents’ basement, but they ran out of room.) “My work keeps me transient. I spend a lot of time in London. I hermitize when I’m in Los Angeles.” Even though he won’t be able to spend much time at the farm, it will be somewhere to call home. “My family and I are going to put a bunch of time into it, and it will be a place where we can convene for Christmas and the like.” His enthusiasm strikes me as completely genuine and also very odd. When I was his age, I was out raising hell most nights. Hayden Christensen is a good-looking 26-year-old guy with lots of disposable income, and the last thing I’d expect him to be doing is “hermitizing.” He assures me that he knows how to have a good time. It’s just that if he has managed to stay out of the tabloids these last couple of years, it’s because he hasn’t been drunk and disorderly in public or getting into fist fights with paparazzi or checking himself into rehab or shaving his head in front of cameras or doing any of the other things young celebrities do when they can’t handle fame’s pressures. “Lifestyle has a lot to do with how often you end up in the tabloids,” he says. “Daniel Day-Lewis went to Italy and became a cobbler. I went out and bought construction equipment.” |
