Available Tuesday 1st July from Titan Magazines, the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 20th Anniversary Special Edition dives deep into the making of the (then) last ever Star Wars film as it celebrates its 20th anniversary, and here’s an exclusive Fantha Tracks extract from the book as we look at Hayden Christensen in the role of Anakin Skywalker
Hayden Christensen was only 19 years old when he was cast as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. The virtually unknown television actor faced the arduous task of not only being convincing as the young Jedi torn between duty and love, but also showing the hunger for power that would see him seduced to the dark side by the final film of the prequel trilogy. In portraying such as a complex role, Christensen’s task was to bridge the innocence of Jake Lloyd’s Anakin in The Phantom Menace with the iconic villainy of Darth Vader from the original trilogy.
“It was a difficult challenge,” that actor admitted in 2005 to Star Wars Insider. “I didn’t have someone to emulate, like Ewan [McGregor] did with Alec Guinness. Yet I still had a character who was pre-defined by the other actors who had played him. It was a bit of an odd juxtaposition. Ultimately, I had to be the linear connection between that Anakin that Jake had played, and capture Darth Vader as portrayed by Sebastian Shaw when he was demasked in Return of the Jedi.
“When I’m playing a scene, I don’t try to pull the experience from my own life and use them as motivation to extract a certain emotion,” added Christensen. “For me, it’s all about the circumstance and the situation my character is in and trying to impose whatever stimulus it is that they are reacting to, and to make that real for myself, so that the performance feels right for the scene and for the progression of the character.”
Despite Anakin’s fall from grace, Christensen remained convinced that audiences would still feel some empathy towards the character. “You will sympathize with Anakin if you allow yourself to be seduced in the same way that Palpatine seduced him,” the actor insisted. “The problem is that Anakin more or less sells his soul to the devil, and in doing so is fed a bunch of propaganda that he’s forced to believe because of the position he’s in. But it’s all actually a con. So, you can be very sympathetic if you allow yourself to be deceived by the con as well. It’s not until the last act of the film that Anakin starts to lose his cool and go outside of himself and really feeds on his ambition and the temptations that surround him.”
The moment that everyone else had been waiting for, of course, was the return of Darth Vader. “It was thrilling,” recalled Christensen, who donned the black leather suit, flowing cape, and dark helmet for the climactic transformation, with James Earl Jones returning to provide Vader’s voice. “To finally get dressed up as Darth Vader felt like it gave my role some finality, some completion.”
“It was really nice that they allowed me to get into the suit, because they could have just put some really tall guy in it and gotten away with it,” the actor continued. “But I begged and pleaded, so they actually built a suit to fit me. They had to make a big muscle suit so that I could physically fill out the costume, one of the sumo wrestling suits that you get into at a fair, which wasn’t very intimidating at all!”
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 20th Anniversary Special Edition is on sale July 1. Celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of the final episode in the prequel trilogy with this deluxe special edition filled with interviews with the cast and crew, Natalie Portman (Padmé Amidala), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu) and Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine).
