Hayden Christensen

Anakin Skywalker walks into a moisture farm on Tatooine looking for his mother and finds a stranger with news he does not want. For ten minutes in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), nobody hands Hayden Christensen a speech, and he is good: still, watchful, a young man who has just understood something and does not yet know what to do with his face. An hour earlier, by a lake on Naboo, the same actor was telling Natalie Portman how much he dislikes sand, and we squirmed for both of them. Christensen is a much better actor when he is not talking.

He came up through Canadian television from the age of twelve or thirteen, had early roles in In the Mouth of Madness (1995) and The Virgin Suicides (1999), and was first properly noticed in Life as a House (2001), playing a son raw enough to hurt. George Lucas had already cast him as the adult Anakin in 2000. The two prequels, in 2002 and 2005, made him famous everywhere and fixed the reputation for years: wooden, said most critics, or petulant, and we understand why. We scored Attack of the Clones 54, and the hour that costs it most is the hour he is on screen talking. What we thought then and still think is that the failure is on the page. He is playing a boy meant to be gifted, arrogant and frightened of himself, and Lucas and Jonathan Hales gave him sulk to say, so sulk is what came out.

The film most often reached for when people want to be fair to him is Shattered Glass (2003), in which he plays the journalist Stephen Glass through a lie that gets away from him; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length. What we can say from the prequels is that his physical commitment is real, the lightsaber work fast and hard and looking like effort rather than dance, and that the Tatooine scene moved us more than a film which had spent an hour losing us had any right to. The talent is there. It is not evenly distributed, and it needs a director who knows where to find it.

After Star Wars came leads in Awake (2007) and Jumper (2008) and a run of genre films that most critics shrugged at. He came back to Anakin by voice in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), then in person in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) and Ahsoka (2023), seventeen years after he last wore the costume, by which time the character's turn in Revenge of the Sith (2005) was being looked at more kindly by some as an arc that paid off. "It's great to hide behind a mask," he said of Vader. That is a modest thing for an actor to say, and on the evidence it is also true: the less he is asked to say, the more he lets us see.