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Hayden Christensen, Superstar
So what does Hayden Christensen want? It’s an important question because these days Hollywood chews up and spits out leading men as quickly as it does leading women. In all of Christensen’s early films, his characters want, more than anything, to be taken seriously. It has been a fertile theme for all his man-child characters (the young Anakin’s voyage toward the Dark Emperor, the fraudster reporter in Shattered Glass), but this persona has run its course. It’s fine when you’re a teenager, but grown men who want to be taken seriously are just plain grating, and they have no place in the movies outside of Woody Allen films. So the real question becomes, what does Hayden Christensen want now? Judging by the three films slated for release, the answer would seem to be, he’s not sure yet. In Virgin Territory, a comedy based on the 14th-century collection of novellas The Decameron, he plays a wayfaring vagabond who falls for Mischa Barton. In the thriller Awake, he plays a rich young businessman married to Jessica Alba who, during surgery, suffers “anaesthetic awareness,” a horrifying condition in which he cannot speak or move but can hear and feel everything his surgeons say and do. In Jumper, he plays a regular guy who discovers he has the uncanny ability to teleport himself anywhere on Earth and decides to use his powers to, um, rob banks – until he realizes he is not alone and is dragged into the secret war that rages among the world’s teleporters. Taken together, these three roles look like Hollywood’s version of throwing spaghetti at a fridge: Let’s try Hayden in a period comedy, then Hayden in a horror thriller, then Hayden in a dystopian sci-fi adventure – and see what sticks. Christensen claims the choices are deliberate. The director of Jumper, Doug Liman, single-handedly reinvigorated the tired spy genre with the rivetingly stylized The Bourne Identity. And he says he has suffered no professional stigma from being so closely associated in the public imagination with the young Darth Vader. But beyond that, he approaches his career much as you’d expect for a 26-year-old guy: He doesn’t have a master plan, and he’s not too worried about it either. “I take it job by job, and I enjoy my time between projects,” he says, frequently travelling during his time off to London and throughout Europe. “I want to still be acting 10 years from now, but then again I don’t know… We’ll see how the farming works out.” Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
