Elliot Page on ‘Juno,’ Hollywood, coming out as trans and the new joy he finds in work: ‘There’s a full-bodied sigh of relief now’

Like so many of us, when the world shuddered to a halt during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elliot Page found himself face-to-face with the prospect of a great reset. For him, the vision of a different future was something entirely literal.

It was springtime in New York and Page spotted his own reflection in a storefront window, cocooned in a hoodie, his face half-hidden by a mask, and saw a glimmer of possibility. “It was a boy,” he writes, “his body, his walk, the profile with the ball cap.” As the Nova Scotia-born actor, producer, and director recounts in his stirring new memoir, “Pageboy,” the experience was “a portal to a new world.”

That moment served as both a catalyst and a confirmation. A few months later, on Dec. 1, 2020, Page would come out as transgender, sharing his truth and his name in a cautiously joyous Instagram post. “I was seeing what other people saw when I would get addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Dude’ or ‘Monsieur,’ and knowing that’s what I wanted,” Page says now. While that desire wasn’t a new revelation, “I’d always talked myself out of it, always convinced myself it was too much — that I was being dramatic, that I just needed to learn to be comfortable, to wear tighter sports bras or cut my hair a certain way.”

At 36, Page has been empowered to exist in the world the way he yearned to for years. The day we speak, this world includes a skyscraper in downtown Toronto, where he perches in a greige club chair that matches his outfit: khakis and a loose Members Only-style jacket in non-confrontational neutrals.

Some stars exude a kind of entitlement that consumes all the oxygen in a room; Page is the opposite. If anything, he tries to cede space. His voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper; he is unfailingly polite and gracious, but he seems drained. It’s a week and change into his tour for “Pageboy,” a book anchored in the crucial transformation he has confronted over the past few years. The memoir debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list — no great surprise, given Page’s celebrity and the fact that just by virtue of being himself, he represents one of the most polarizing cultural “debates” of our current moment. (Note the intentional quotation marks: the lives, rights and happiness of trans people are not subjects for debate.)

“Pageboy” is a compelling, deeply affecting read. It is non-linear and unvarnished, hopscotching between episodes in the actor’s life in a way that gently teases out recurring themes and echoes. This was somewhat deliberate, Page says, but it also reflects his instinctive process: homing in on a particular moment or relationship in his life, and just letting his thoughts spill out.

The stream-of-consciousness effect is underscored by his tendency to write sentences that alternate between terse, weighty fragments and rippling comma-linked chains of three or four clauses. Page writes candidly about past relationships (tabloids have gleefully seized on the names he’s named). But what really stands out is the way he evokes the physical experience of living in his body. This comes through in his account of that revelatory moment in the spring of 2020 and in his descriptions of sex (both consensual and not). It comes through when he tries to explain what gender dysphoria feels like for him: “Imagine the most uncomfortable, mortifying thing you could wear. You squirm in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it from your body, tear it off, but you can’t.” That somatic quality, Page says, was relatively organic, but there was an urgency to it, too. “Not that trans and queer lives and bodies haven’t always been politicized. But obviously, everything’s at an intense fever pitch right now.”

Page has been called the world’s most visible transgender man, a responsibility that he feels in his core and gamely strives to balance on his narrow shoulders. Two summers ago, in May 2021, he shared another post on Instagram: a full-body photo of himself, beaming and shirtless in swim trunks, another glimpse of possibility. In a climate where conservatives and radical feminists alike have been politicizing transgender bodies — and, indeed, working to undermine the very existence of trans people — that image spoke volumes. It was a concrete illustration of what it can mean to have access to gender-affirming care; a way of grounding a speculative and frequently cruel debate in lived reality. And it was a rare, brilliant flash of trans euphoria, a powerful reminder that the life of a transgender person involves beauty and happiness, not just navigating moments of trauma.

That swimsuit photo is reminiscent of a scene in “Pageboy,” in which Page, having just crested puberty, is in a pal’s backyard on a sweltering summer day, watching a wading pool fill up. He hasn’t brought his own swimsuit, so his friend’s dad tosses over a boy’s Speedo. Page feels no shame about his bare chest. “The only shift was in my happiness,” he writes, “enhancing all the colours and sounds. A rush of joy.”

It’s a reminder of how this fundamental tension — between the person he knew himself to be and the person he felt obligated to present to the world — was a constant theme in Page’s life. Even as a little kid in Halifax, he was happy staging bathtub diving competitions for his superhero figurines and eating ketchup chips while watching “Hockey Night in Canada,” but that comfort zone was fractured on the rare occasions he had to dress up — skirts, barrettes — for special events or photos. In 1997, around age 10, Page was cast in the period drama “Pit Pony,” a role that required him to don petticoats and a wig to play a young girl in a 1900s Maritime mining town.

Given his penchant for escaping into his own stories — something he describes in the book as a “journey of the imagination” — it’s perhaps not surprising that Page had a natural talent for acting; from that point on, he was consistently onscreen and in the spotlight. In 2007, his performance as a wry pregnant teenager in “Juno” earned raves and a well-deserved Oscar nomination. (As Page has noted, both in his memoir and in interviews, of all the parts he’s played, he felt very much at home in the guise of this world-weary, hoodie-wearing, knocked-up tomboy. “Juno was emblematic of what could be possible,” he writes, “a space beyond the binary.” Imagine the ironic sting, then, when he was directed to present himself with extreme feminine glamour during the awards-season campaign.)

Those accolades led to more work (including a superhero role in the “X-Men” franchise) and more scrutiny, in a dizzying churn through the murkier depths of Hollywood. In “Pageboy,” the actor neatly illuminates the ways in which his discomfort in his own skin and his vulnerability as a young performer made him particularly susceptible to a host of abuses, from sexual assaults on film sets to crass speculation about his sexuality. Page eventually came out as queer, in a shaky-voiced speech during an event supporting LGBTQ2S rights on Valentine’s Day in 2014.

Owning some of his truth was a start, but it wasn’t a solution. Page struggled with snide whispers and backlash. “Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness,” he notes in the book, while also detailing the ways in which coming out complicated his personal and professional life. He drew on his experience and his privilege to find opportunities for advocacy; he produced and starred in the 2015 film “Freeheld,” about the real-life story of a lesbian who was denied pension benefits after her partner died; with best pal Ian Daniel, he headed the VICE documentary series “Gaycation,” a look at LGBTQ2S communities around the world, which premiered in 2016 and ran for two seasons. He was finally able to live openly with queer partners, including his spouse Emma Portner, whom he married in 2018 and divorced in 2021. By and large, he kept himself very occupied.

But in reading “Pageboy,” you also get the sense that the busyness served as a buffer — a way of fending off a reality, or a realization, that he wasn’t yet prepared to confront. And so it was only in 2020, when he was forced to sit with his own thoughts, that Page finally looked at himself in the mirror.

“Life had become a little connect-the-dots for me,” he says. “I wasn’t feeling that alive, really, or inspired. And having the space to leave New York and not have to stress about not working — let me not go play the next thing I was contractually obliged to do, the girl that I was supposed to play. It was very difficult in moments, but it let me get closer and closer to this truth that I kept trying to shove away.”

For all the pain he endured as a public figure, it is unequivocally clear that nothing has been quite as brutal for Page as the experience of living with his own unwieldy mess of self-loathing and dysphoria. His memoir includes countless examples, of the ways in which he tormented and harmed himself, from cutting to starvation to punching himself in the head. And even to look at him now, wan and exhausted, but on a quest to use his position in the world to advocate for change, it’s clear that this isn’t a simple fix. He certainly doesn’t suggest it is. But, Page says, he has found new joy in work: “Something in me was so tight and constricted, and I feel embodied now in a way that I never thought was possible. There’s a full-bodied sigh of relief now.”

He’s started a production company, Page Boy Productions, with the aim of connecting with queer people, trans people and people from other marginalized groups, regardless of experience, to bring new stories to light. (One example: “Len & Cub,” a six-part series about the secret romance between two men in a remote part of New Brunswick in the early 20th century, which has been greenlit by Paramount Plus.)

“In many ways I feel like I barely made it,” he says. “I really did struggle for years and years. When I think of what it took to get to where I’m able to be now, with the resources that I have, the access to mental health care — let alone gender- and trans-affirming care — that absolutely motivates me to want to use this platform for good.”

SHARE: