The most interesting thing about meeting Hayden Christensen is how laid-back and casual a guy he is-unusual for someone who found movie superstardom quickly, and went from working actor to movie franchise player almost overnight. With his finely detailed, Golden Globe-nominated dramatic performance in Irwin Winkler's Life as a House, Christensen caught everyone's eye. Then came an ordinary guy named George Lucas, who changed everything at once. With his role as Anakin Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, in Lucas' Star Wars: Episode II, Christensen's emerging career catapulted-at light speed-into proportions almost as epic as the film series itself.

Now he's back with a major dramatic performance in Billy Ray's Shattered Glass, the true story of New Republic fallen scribe and fib-maker Stephen Glass. In the title role, Christensen again shows what a fine actor he can be in a small project, uncluttered with technology but loaded with intelligence and conviction. Possibly best of all, Shattered Glass finds Christensen stripped of his pretty boy image and comfortably at home wrestling with an intensely cerebral, convicted performance, in a film that matches him with its clear-headed take on the power of the press and the ethics of journalism.

Hayden Christensen: I didn't get to speak to him. He wasn't really making himself that available for us, but I had all of his articles. And from the articles I had, which predefined what was fact and what was fiction, I got a sense for his storytelling and how colorful he created these lies. I had a couple of photographs. It wasn't really a lot, but it felt sufficient to play this character. It wasn't like I was playing Ronald Reagan. He wasn't really a well-known public figure. I had been told that it was quite accurate. I felt like I was affording myself some creative freedom, which worked out for the best, so they say. There's a lot you can get from just a still picture too. For me, having just read the Vanity Fair piece and the couple of photographs that were provided in that, I kind of felt like from there-and a few other opinions of people that he worked with-that it was enough.

I think you have to have a clear sense of what you want to present before you get into production, otherwise it will be a little too inconsistent. I think some inconsistency gives it life, but you have to be pretty concretely formulated before you go in. And everything that was formulating that opinion was still surrounding me when we filmed it. I got a lot from speaking with Billy (Ray). He had done an immense amount of research to write the screenplay. And we had Chuck Lane (former editor, The New Republic) come in for a couple of days, but that wasn't until halfway into the shoot, and he was only there for a couple of days. So there really wasn't that much that was going to change my perception of it, in large part because I was dictating how he was being presented, and how a lot of people perceived him. I don't know. After it starts to seep under your skin a little, it weighs on you a little bit more, so you get to know him a little bit better, but it doesn't alter it, it just strengthens it.

HC: Everything within the story is accurately correct. And we never go into motivation. We never go into intent because that's something that we couldn't define. I had to for myself, just to play the character, and I can't say to you it's what Stephen was going through. And it was a risk for me, and something that was in the back of my head was, `Is this going to closely resemble Stephen Glass?' And it was a slight relief when people like Chuck Lane would see the film and confirm for me that it was. It was a risk but one that apparently didn't bite me in the ass in the end.

HC: I obviously had a vested interest in telling the story. I had experienced fraudulent journalism with people putting words in my mouth. And that's not what our story is about actually, but at the same time I think what Stephen did is almost an exaggerated version of something…. I have great respect for what you guys do. I think it's an incredibly difficult profession to report on something without doing your own bias. You want to present something that's going to be intriguing to you readers, so you therefore have to have a point of view; you have to have that angle not become your perspective.

HC: Yeah, I know. It's a difficult thing that you guys do and I have a great respect for that. I would hope that our movie - and it's not a cautionary tale - we're not saying it's a trend in journalism, but more or less I would hope that people would leave the theater with that thought process of, `How can a movie accurately depict what happened in his life?' They're filmmakers. And I hope that would work its way into how can anyone accurately depict anything? So for me, I'm definitely more aware of the writer and not just the story, as I think you should be. I think this makes it a little more informed.

HC: This was a little bit after I had finished Episode II. I had done Life as a House after Episode II, and then I went off and I had done a play, and then I had done this. So there wasn't any concerted thinking as to how I was going to counteract what I was doing in Star Wars, as much as it was about finding an interesting story, that I deemed important, and a character that was intriguing and thought that I could maybe get a handle on. And from there, all the pieces kind of aligned.

LS: When you're working on a huge film like Star Wars, where there's so much focus on art direction and special effects, from an actor's point of view, when you step on a set like that, what's the process like, versus something small and character-based like Shattered Glass? How does that smallness or largeness of scale affect what you do as an actor?

HC: The approach isn't so much different, but the acting is entirely different. You notice that it does have a more intimate, contained feel, and you feel more able to kind of explore things organically, and figure things from the inside out and not be so concerned with what's going on on the periphery. And in a film like Star Wars, there's so much going on all the time that has nothing to do with what's being presented on the replay, I mean, on what you're filming. And it does kind of dilute the creative process a little bit. And when you're working on a film that you're making for very little money, everyone has to be there for all the right reasons. And so it has a completely different sensibility to it.

HC: Yeah. There's too much going on. George has to be concerned with what's going on behind the actors, in front of the actors. The technical aspects are almost mind-boggling. I still can't figure out what they do. So it is what it is, and you have to appreciate what you're there to do.

HC: It's not easy! It was quite foreign to me. I think this time around I was a little more settled in that environment. But yeah, you don't have any of your stimuli that affect you. Half the time you're talking to characters that aren't even there. So it's completely different. They both have their appeals, and I don't prefer one of them to the other, they're just different, you know?

HC: I stumbled into it. I started doing commercials when I was eight years old. An agent approached me, and I was just trying to be polite and said, `Yeah, sure.' And subsequently, the high school that my parents wanted me to attend was outside the district region where you could go to that school. But they had a performing arts program within the mainstream high school that you could audition for. And since I'd been in a few commercials, I thought I'd audition for the drama program. And I did, and got in and started studying it and took a liking to it. And that's where the passion developed. When I was growing up in Canada, I did a few small television shows as well.

I developed a process, and I started to study and realized that there was a craft that you could apply. Then I thought I'd maybe take this seriously as a profession. The process evolved for what works best for whatever the application is, so for film it was a big learning process for me. I did this television show when I was eighteen, as soon as I got out of high school, and that was a great learning experience for me because all of my training was done on a stage, and it was how you'd portray a character in theater.

And trying to apply that to a television character, the first time I saw it, I was like, `What am I doing?' I learned how to modify my acting process, how to become more economical with work. So I learned a lot during that show. And then I came back and I did theater, and rediscovered the whole thing I loved about acting to begin with. I would definitely like to find the medium to go in and out of both. I don't know if I'll do any more television.

LS: A big part of a working actor's life is about the constant process of auditioning. Are you at a level now in your career where you don't necessarily have to audition? Do they say, `We want Hayden Christensen for this role?' Do you still have to read?

HC: It depends. I auditioned for Life as House and that was after I had done Star Wars. With this film, my production company was a part of producing it so it was something that I had developed with the other people involved. I'm not against auditioning. I haven't auditioned in a little while. Actually that's not true; that's absolutely not true. I auditioned for the next film I'm going to do, which doesn't start until the latter part of next year. It's a romantic comedy and I did sort of a pseudo-audition via satellite with this director in Australia, where I read lines for her.

HC: I don't know. I do think we neither villianized him nor glamorized what he did, and so I would hope that he would appreciate that. I would be very interested, because the people who have seen the film, who lived this, thought that we got it pretty accurate. Chuck (Lane) was kind of our gauge for how authentic it felt, and Peter's (Sarsgaard) character and my character, and how much we really got that right.