Elliot Page: ‘My queerness is what made Juno extra special’

There is a line in Elliot Page’s new film, Close to You, that I keep thinking about. It happens early, when his character – a trans man coming home to his family – runs into an old friend from high school, a woman who hasn’t seen him since before his transition. The friend smiles, studies him. “You look the same,” she tells him. “Just more you.”

The same. More you. Page had brilliant experiences on the films he made before his real-life transition – think the sandpaper-dry coming-of-age comedy Juno, or Christopher Nolan’s trippy Inception – but they weren’t whole experiences, he says. “This will sound so dramatic,” he warns. “But I feel like I’ve got to a level of calm that I didn’t think I’d ever reach on a set. I just couldn’t…” He begins to tiptoe through his sentences, lots of scattered thoughts colliding at once. “I was always too uncomfortable. Too not-present. Too…” He pauses. It’s a long one. “There have been moments, playing certain characters, where there was that joy, that thrill, that sensation, but to sense it so fully? It’s something I wouldn’t have imagined possible back then.” He grins, his face all angles and relief.

Page is in a Los Angeles hotel room, on a break from promoting the final season of his Netflix sci-fi series The Umbrella Academy. His Close to You director, Dominic Savage, is at home in north London. We’re speaking on a group video call. Page and Savage seem, at first, an unlikely pairing. Page is 37 but looks far younger, an Oscar nominee for Juno and, particularly after coming out as trans in 2020, one of the most talked-about people on the planet. Savage is a twinkly-eyed, 61-year-old cisgender Brit, a filmmaker with an interest in naturalistic drama and moving character studies.

But Page loved his work and his loose, improvisational approach – on his Channel 4 anthology series I Am…, featuring stars including Kate Winslet and Samantha Morton, he and his actors would meet and slowly build a story from ideas they were interested in exploring. Close to You came about similarly. On the film’s set, Savage would sometimes let his camera roll with no fixed endpoint. One single take lasted 53 minutes.

“I enjoy it when I see actors doing something that I totally believe,” Savage says. “I watch lots of films, and while many are very well made, and it’s great acting, I’m not actually seeing the reality of their feelings. This process allows for that. And when I look at Elliot on screen, or when we were making our film, I was actually terribly affected by it. I knew he was going to a very powerful place within himself.”

Close to You is something of a cinematic homecoming for Page, and his first film since 2017’s Flatliners, a dismal horror remake that – in his 2023 memoir Pageboy – he described as a “true mess”. It feels significant that Close to You is more aligned not just with Page’s own identity, but to storytelling that is small, intimate and character-driven. He plays Sam, who we meet as he prepares for a four-years-in-the-making return to his family. During the gap, he’s transitioned, and knows that journeying back into his past will open up old wounds. The film is funny, tender and steers nicely clear of cliche – Sam isn’t skittish about his family because they’re terrible, for instance. In fact, they’re well-intentioned liberals. But Close to You understands the awkwardness of being the elephant in the room; of being a person who is so accommodated and indulged that it becomes vaguely exhausting.

“The goal was to not have, like, this awful, transphobic family, and that be the big conflict,” Page says. “The idea was to have this family that was really doing their best, and do love Sam. I wanted to find that balance between joy, and the sensation of getting to a place personally that you never thought you’d get to, but also pain and grief and those ongoing hurdles. That’s life, you know?”

It’s also not Page’s life. While there are clear biographical parallels between Page and Sam, Sam seems to have had a far easier go of things. Page, for instance, wrote in his memoir that he is estranged from his father and stepmother (the former has engaged online with right-wing figures including the author Jordan Peterson, who has used his vast media platform to attack Page), while his relationship with his mother – a minister’s daughter who at one point told him that homosexuality doesn’t exist – has fluctuated over the decades. They are close today, however.

Savage tells me that he’s been knocked out by the response to the film on the festival circuit, particularly at last year’s BFI Flare, London’s LGBT+ film festival, where it received a standing ovation and strong reviews. Individual responses from young queer and trans people have meant even more. “They’d tell me that it was a really important thing for them to have seen,” he says, “and that’s kind of why I want to make films in the first place.”

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Much of Close to You feels novel. Sam and his high school friend Katherine (a warm Hillary Baack) share a complex, vaguely romantic dynamic free of the “rules” of gender and sexual identity. Sam’s family sometimes misgender him, but it’s accidental and no big deal. And notably, Sam is, well, sexy. Trans characters are illusive in film and television. Trans characters with busy, satisfying sex lives – who lounge around naked in bed with their partners – even more so. For Page, Sam’s sexual confidence, and the general ease he has about his body, meant he’d have to bare his chest on-screen for the first time – something he’d never done even before his top surgery. He was reluctant at first, but only because he was worried the scene in question veered into cliche.

“I was, like, ‘Dominic, we don’t want the trans guy looking at himself in the mirror’,” Page laughs. “But then I thought, hey, this is just a guy waking up. He probably does sleep shirtless.” It was ultimately no big deal. “It was nice not to have to think, what will it mean if I show my body? It’s just –” He shrugs. “I’m just an actor in a movie, right?”

It’s true, but also not. It’s not an outrageous statement to say that Page is probably the most famous trans person in the world right now. And certainly the most famous trans movie star. By sheer virtue of Page’s existence, everything he does is significant, every career move or opportunity a reflection on where we’re at as a culture. It’s a lot to put on one person’s shoulders. Does he feel the pressure?

“I think…” Page takes another long pause. “I’m learning how to better achieve a balance. If I’m overwhelmed about certain things, or if I’m reading something [horrible], I’m gonna go for a beautiful long walk with my dog.” He laughs. “For me, when the noise gets really loud, I like to centre in on this feeling of, like, ‘You’re not gonna take away my joy.’”

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Of course, he adds, he’s also not delusional about the state of things. “You can’t help but not come back to the reality of the situation we’re in,” he says, firmly. In the US, hate crimes related to gender identity rose by 32 per cent in 2022, according to the FBI, while a record number of hate crimes were committed against transgender people in England and Wales between 2022 and 2023, according to a Home Office report.

“I’ve struggled in life to get where I am today, but I also have access to resources and care that many do not,” Page continues. “So I want to use my platform and connect with others to help elevate their voices and…” He pauses again, and breaks into a half-smile. “I’m just trying to do my best.” He grimaces. “Sorry, I feel like I’ve just talked about myself so much in this interview.”

You get the impression that Page isn’t a natural spokesperson. His sentences tend to loop-de-loop around a central point, he umms and ahhs and doubles back. Politics, activism, role modeling – it’s not an easy fit. Instead, it feels like a necessary evil. “Often it’s awkward because I do end up in this position of being asked about things, when other people have far more experience with them than I do,” he says. “Whether it’s related to policy or healthcare… often it’s the thing where I’m like, oh my God, there are other people you should be speaking to, you know?” He laughs, then exhales.

“But then that does make me educate myself,” he continues. “I know I need to stay on top of things. I’m also so fortunate to have an incredible community of trans people in my life, who are just so busy and overwhelmed with all the s*** they’ve got going on, but who are so kind to me and supportive whenever I’m like, ‘Hey, can I run something by you?’. I feel very supported. And that’s the thing that keeps you going on those days where you’re just waking up to the next awful person saying stuff.” He sighs. “Like f***! Everybody’s feeling it, you know?”

The inevitable weight of the conversation that surrounds Page also tends to overshadow his actual work. Which sucks, because Page has always been a really, really great actor. He has a brilliant face, sharp and handsome, which always seems to shift between mischief and pensiveness. It’s what marked Page early as a preternaturally gifted talent – he grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was a TV star in Canada by the age of 10. The grim 2005 thriller Hard Candy, in which his character laid a trap for a prolific child molester, took him global. There followed a few X-Men movies – he played the mutant Kitty Pryde – as well as Juno and Drew Barrymore’s cult roller derby film Whip It.

Juno, about a snarky pregnant teen with a disposition somewhere between an old-timey comedian and a space alien, remains his finest hour as a performer. But it’s also interesting to rewatch it now through a queer lens, and through the lens of everything that Page has talked about publicly since (he came out, pre-transition, as gay in 2014, and in 2021 described himself as both queer and non-binary). Because even back then, there was a feeling that Juno MacGuff wasn’t exactly the heterosexual teenager the film made her out to be. She felt, even if she didn’t know it herself, on the cusp of something. When I say to Page that Juno was – I guess? – a straight girl, he shoots me a look that can only be read as: “B****, please.”

“I look back now and [queerness] is all I see in most of my characters,” he says. “And that’s exactly what made Juno so special, and why so many people did connect with that character.” He built her from the ground up. “I was like, this is how this character is going to dress. This is her cadence, how she moves, how she walks. A lot of it obviously came from my queerness.”

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It was only after the film was made and Juno became a phenomenon that Page’s voice was taken away. He’s spoken previously about being ordered to wear heels and gowns while on the awards circuit for the movie, and having no say in how he was presented to the media – despite Juno being more of a sneakers-and-T-shirts sort of gal. “And now, when I reflect on that movie, and all the dresses I had to wear while promoting it, it’s like… extra gross. Because my queerness is actually what made that movie extra special, in my opinion,” he says. “Obviously it’s an incredible script and filmmaker and all of those things, but my queerness is so related to how that character was, you know?”

It’s gratifying to see him talking like this, about acting and the creative process. He tells me he’s amped up about performing again, in a way that he hasn’t been for a long time – maybe ever. And, as he makes very clear to Savage, he’s looking for work. “I want us to do another thing together so bad,” he tells him. “What are you doing over there in London? Writing for other actors? Who cares?” Savage is game. “And we don’t have to make it in winter in Canada this time, either,” Page jokes.

He’s back. He looks the same. Just more him.

‘Close to You’ is in cinemas from 30 August