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. His 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 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.