Saturday, September 2, 2000
Stars born, reborn Christensen and Lando in Higher Ground debut
By CLAIRE BICKLEY -- Toronto Sun
Source - Canoe.com

One TV star is born, another reborn when Higher Ground makes its Canadian TV debut tonight.

The drama about troubled teens at a wilderness high school stars Thornhill 19-year-old Hayden Christensen. He's now known around the world as the actor who is playing Anakin Skywalker in the next Star Wars movie. But he's been seen very little so far here at home on either the large or small screen.

Another surprise for viewers will be Higher Ground's other lead, an actor who is very familiar yet strikingly changed.

'A little fat and lazy'

Joe Lando is virtually unrecognizable to those who remember his six years and 172 episodes of playing Byron Sully on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

In Higher Ground, which premieres at 7 p.m. on ONtv, extreme sportswear has replaced his buckskins, his lion's mane of hair is close-cropped and his body is noticeably bulked up.

"This gave me a chance to just completely reinvent myself. I had to cut my hair. I had to get in shape because I'd gotten a little fat and lazy," says the 39-year-old actor, who is also one of the series' producers.

The Vancouver-made drama is also surprisingly muscular, considering it was made to air first on the soft, sunny Fox Family cable channel in the U.S.

Christensen's character, Scott, has been sexually exploited by his stepmother and has a drug problem. Lando's teacher/counselor character, Peter, is a former stock broker recovering from a cocaine-and-heroin addiction.

At a real-life version of the show's Mt. Horizon school, Lando sat in on group therapy sessions as research.

"I felt like crying about a dozen different times. You see these tough kids, these gangbanger kids, a couple of guys a lot bigger than me even though they were just 15 or 16 years old, and all these kids really were looking for was love," he says. "It sounds corny but (they needed) hugs and love and to be told that even though they screwed up over here, they're allowed to make mistakes and come back from them and persevere."

Lando speaks from there-but-for-the-Grace-of-God experience, easily picturing himself having ended up in just such a school. As a teen, he rebelled against his upbringing in a strict, conservative, blue-collar Catholic family living just outside Chicago.

"I was a wild child," Lando recalls. "We just had to make our own entertainment a lot and it had to do with a lot of violence. We used to fight, just beating on each other and going out and just being rowdy kids in general. School was something that we tried to blow off."

At 18, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting dream but supported himself mostly as a cook until breaking through with roles on the soaps One Life To Live and then The Guiding Light before Medicine Woman came along.

Cast turnover

If Higher Ground doesn't continue to a second season, he has an idea for a series set in hi-tech Silicon Valley. If Higher Ground does go on, the now-famous Christensen wants to appear in at least some of its episodes. If he doesn't, that will just fit the producers' plan for cast turnover to realistically reflect the teens' passage through and beyond the school.

"That was always the intention,"