Hayden Christensen Once Caught a Burglar in His House — the Burglar Recognized Him and Apologized

LOS ANGELES — Hayden Christensen walked onto the L.A. Comic Con stage Friday night in a ball cap and hoodie, took one look at the crowd and laughed about how bright the room was. Over the next 45 minutes, moderated by a deputy comics editor who grew up watching him, the Anakin Skywalker actor told the story of the best phone call of his life, teased the one non-Star Wars role he’d revisit, and revealed the strangest fan encounter of his career — one that started with his own front door opening.

The burglar who knew his face

Asked for his strangest fan encounter, Christensen didn’t hesitate: he was once recognized by the man robbing his house.

Years ago, he said, he was home on a phone call waiting for a friend when the front door opened and footsteps went upstairs. He assumed it was his friend being weird. He even got up and did a sort of do-si-do around a walk-around fireplace with the intruder before sitting back down to finish his call. When he finally went to surprise his “friend,” he found a stranger holding an armful of his belongings.

“I’m like, is this a delivery guy?” he said. “And I look and I’m like, this is all my stuff.” The man recognized him on the spot and started apologizing profusely, handing things back while explaining he’d fallen on hard times and was trying to scrape together money for a ticket home.

Christensen’s response: come back tomorrow and I’ll drive you to the train station and buy the ticket. The man never returned — but not before Christensen took him upstairs and gave him clothes and a pair of shoes, since the man said he couldn’t get a job without something decent to wear.

“Please don’t try to burglarize my house again,” he added to the crowd. “I’ve got great security cameras.”

‘Jumper’ is the one he’d go back to

Asked which non-Star Wars character he’d revisit at his current age, Christensen landed on David Rice from 2008’s Jumper — and the room cheered loud enough to surprise the moderator.

“When we did Jumper, we thought we were going to make some more of those films, and then for different reasons we didn’t,” he said. “Don’t hold your breath, but it’s possible maybe one day. There’s a version of that story that could make sense with a great passage of time.”

He called the Doug Liman film “a really cool concept” and confirmed that if he could have any superpower, it would be teleportation.

The most personal role of his career, though, is 2001’s Life as a House. “A good father-son story always kind of gets me,” he said. “Now being a father myself, there’s just something that was very personal about that story and still continues to be.”

His daughter still won’t watch him play Vader

Christensen’s daughter knows her dad is Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader. She just isn’t interested in seeing it yet — and he thinks he knows why.

“It might have something to do with the fact that she knows I play Darth Vader, and she thinks of Darth Vader as being this evil character, and she doesn’t want to see her dad as an evil character,” he said. He deliberately held off introducing her to the films to preserve the experience; by the time he felt she was old enough, she’d lost interest. “I’m totally okay with that.”

She did make it partway through the theatrical re-release of Revenge of the Sith. “She saw the first 15, 20 minutes,” he said. “And then when it got to the point where I was going to take Count Dooku’s head off, I quickly exited with her.”

On the eternal viewing-order debate, Christensen refused to pick a side. George Lucas would want you to start with Episode I, he said, but his own experience — growing up on A New Hope and seeing The Phantom Menace in high school — worked fine too. “I don’t think there’s a right way or a wrong way.”

With the panel landing the night before Halloween, he also said he was hoping to get out in time to take her trick-or-treating Saturday. “I play dress-up for a living, so it’s near and dear to my heart.”

The call, the handshake and the one note from George Lucas

Christensen was 19, asleep in a Vancouver apartment, when both his agents and his manager called at once. “There’s only one reason why they’re all on the phone this early in the morning,” he remembered thinking. “It was the best phone call of my life.”

He was told to keep it secret for a few days until the announcement. He immediately told his roommate, and the two of them “were dancing all over the apartment like giddy little kids.” A few weeks later he was on a plane to Australia.

His first day on the Attack of the Clones set, in costume, he walked up to George Lucas and thanked him. Then he kept doing it. “At the end of every day, I went up to George and I shook his hand and said, thank you so much for this.”

The single piece of direction he carried through both films came from Lucas: Anakin always believes he’s doing the right thing. “Even when he’s doing some rather horrible things — except for maybe the Sand People,” Christensen said. “The villain never sees themselves as the villain. That was sort of the through line that I carried with me.”

The most Anakin thing about him? “I think we’re both very impulsive and sometimes act before we think.”

The Obi-Wan Kenobi return hinged on one scene

When the prequels wrapped, Christensen assumed his Star Wars story was over, and he still thought so when Lucasfilm started making new projects. “Anakin’s story had kind of been told.” He was simply happy for Ewan McGregor when the Obi-Wan Kenobi series was announced — until the call came asking him to join.

There was no hesitation. Director Deborah Chow drove up to his farm in Canada and spent a couple of hours walking him through her vision. The whole return, he said, “hinged on this confrontational moment between Anakin and Darth Vader — the scene where he gets the mask cracked.”

“That was what I had my sights set on,” he said. “I thought the way they wrote the scene was beautiful, and I thought the end result was great.”

Tattoos, Gretzky and the note that said ‘destroy the Sith’

The strangest thing he’s been asked to sign is body parts — and he’s signed more than a few Anakin and Vader tattoos. “That’s a very permanent autograph,” he said. “I thought it was super cool. Cool character. So I support.” (The moderator’s instant headline: Hayden Christensen says get a tattoo of his face.)

The line fans quote at him most is “May the Force be with you,” and he says it back every time “because I think it’s the proper thing to do.” A close second is “This is where the fun begins.” The most creative recent one: a stranger approached him in public and silently handed over a piece of paper reading, “You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them.”

Christensen’s own fan story runs in the other direction. He grew up wanting to be an athlete, not an actor — a Wayne Gretzky poster on the wall, hockey and tennis over film. He got Gretzky’s autograph as a kid at the Canadian Open and has now asked for it three times, most recently in the Toronto Maple Leafs locker room, where Gretzky was holding court with the players.

Acting itself was an accident. His older sister went to meet an agent in Toronto, nobody could watch seven-year-old Hayden, and a different agent in the waiting room asked if he wanted to try too. “As a polite Canadian kid, I said, sure.” It didn’t click as a career until a tenth-grade Shakespeare unit — and he still says what keeps him going is “the communal aspect of filmmaking and storytelling.”

Twenty-plus years in, he said the fan response hasn’t worn off. “It never gets old. As I’ve gotten older, my appreciation has just sort of deepened with time.”

The panel closed the way these things do now — a crowd selfie with the moderator warning the audience he’d be personally disappointed if anyone missed it — and Christensen headed off to another day of signings Saturday. The room’s verdict was already in by then, shouted from the floor mid-burglar-story: “How can you not love this guy?”

Hayden Christensen appears at L.A. Comic Con through Saturday, Oct. 31.

Lead photo: Katrina Lee / The Nerd Wire. Reported from the L.A. Comic Con floor.