Hayden Christensen, Star Wars kid, celebrated his Vader casting by playing pretend lightsabers

Christensen, Ewen McGregor, and Moses Ingram reflect on what it's like to learn you've been cast in Star Wars

By Reid McCarter  |  May 19, 2022 | 3:27pm
Film Features Star Wars
Hayden Christensen, Star Wars kid, celebrated his Vader casting by playing pretend lightsabers
Hayden Christensen mimes the motion of holding an invisible lightsaber and it doesn’t look like anything else. Grow up. Screenshot: Vanity Fair

After the release of Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, a young Canadian found his imagination so fired up with thoughts of Jedi knights and lightsaber duels that he danced around pretending to wield a laser sword, not knowing that very soon the entire world would know his name and face, for better or worse.

No, we aren’t talking about the Star Wars Kid. We’re describing Hayden Christensen’s reaction to finding out he’d been cast as Anakin Skywalker.

Vanity Fair sat Obi-Wan Kenobi’s principal cast—antagonist space wizard (Christensen), titular space wizard (Ewen McGregor), and new, evil space wizard (Moses Ingram)—down to answer a series of identical questions about what it’s like to work on Star Wars.

When asked how he reacted when learning that he’d been cast in Episode II—Attack Of The Clones, Christensen remembers that he got the big call while living in a Vancouver apartment with a friend. “I got the phone call while I was still in bed actually,” Christensen says. “I remember coming out of the room, just an ear-to-ear grin on my face.”

The roommate guessed what his friend was so happy about, which was confirmed when Christensen “lit up an imaginary lightsaber.” Christensen demonstrates the humming saber-noise before describing how his friend ran over to their record player to put on the Star Wars soundtrack and light up his own pretend space sword.

“We had a whole lightsaber battle as we were laughing and jumping all over the couch in the apartment,” he says, adding unnecessarily that “it was a very exciting time for me.”

This level of enthusiasm didn’t disappear entirely when it came time to actually shoot the movies. Later in the interview, Christensen says that he, like Laura Dern after him, couldn’t help “making the lightsaber sound effects when I was doing my lightsaber scenes.” He once again shows what he means by miming a lightsaber movement with his empty hands, which, if the video’s put on mute, looks like something else entirely.

Watch the rest of the interview for more from Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Christensen, McGregor, and Ingram, including their thoughts on wearing Star Wars costumes, returning to old characters, and McGregor’s desire to work just one more time with the legend himself, Jar Jar Binks.

[via Digg]

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