Return of a Jedi: At 41 Hayden Christensen Has Reasons To Celebrate
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Actor Hayden Christensen turned 41 on Tuesday and the actor is poised on the biggest comeback of his career.
Christensen returns as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Disney+ highly anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi with Ewan McGregor and Ahsoka with Rosario Dawson.
Often when an actor is taking on a new character, there is a mountain of prep work that needs to be done. It could be familiarizing oneself with the original source material. It could be researching the character. It could be long conversations with a director about backstory and motivation. But what about when you are returning to a character you already played, albeit 17 years ago?
That was the situation for Hayden Christensen when he picked up his laser sword once again for the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Christensen went deep into the Star Wars canon. “I went back and rewatched all the films,” says the man who will be once again going behind the mask as Darth Vader. “And I also got into the animated shows, The Clone Wars and Rebels.”
There’s obviously a lot more Anakin/Vader content to consume in those series, which helped give the actor even more perspective and material to draw upon in terms on both what his character has been through in the years leading up to Obi-Wan Kenobi and what is on the horizon after.
“It was interesting,” Christensen says of binging The Clone Wars and Rebels. “They did a lot with these characters in those shows. And they did further explore the relationship. There was interesting stuff there to learn about. It was great fun getting to go back and re-immerse yourself in this world that just continues to grow and become more and more vast.”
With the news already announced that Christensen/Vader will also be appearing in Disney+’s upcoming Ahsoka series (based on a character originally created for The Clone Wars who also showed up on Rebels), it seems his time studying the animated series was indeed time well spent. Some might even call his research impressive… most impressive.
Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres May 27 on Disney+.
