Elliot Page poses for a portrait in Toronto on June 16. The actor’s new memoir charts his journey from Nova Scotia to Hollywood.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Toronto’s downtown core was draped in rainbows the day Elliot Page arrived for the latest stop on his book tour, halfway through Pride Month.
Just one day earlier, the actor’s new memoir, Pageboy, which charts his journey from Nova Scotia to Hollywood, debuted atop The New York Times and The Globe and Mail Best Sellers lists, making his first literary effort an instant hit.
The HarperCollins office, like the downtown core, was brimming with signs of Pride. A glowing heart greeted guests in the building’s lobby. Staffers offered guests popsicles in a rainbow of colours, matching various flags of the queer community. A bowl of stickers reading “Love stories for all” and “Find your happily ever after” sat outside the conference room where Page was quietly but dutifully answering questions from a parade of journalists.
Despite those joyful trappings, this Pride month is a precarious one, particularly for trans people. It is likewise a precarious time to release a trans story like Page’s into the world.
In the United States, where Page has lived and worked for much of his career, there are currently 491 anti-LGBTQ bills under legislative consideration, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Meanwhile, in his native Canada, youth advocates have raised alarm bells in New Brunswick that a new policy concerning chosen names and pronouns in schools could lead to discrimination against LGBTQ students. In Manitoba, Pride decorations have been vandalized in multiple rural communities. And in British Columbia, a transphobic verbal attack against a nine-year-old recently made national headlines.
To be out as trans in the current political environment requires living in the face of great opposition. To be so with a platform as large as Page’s is largely unprecedented territory. Page is, by any measure, one of the most successful Canadian actors of his generation. He was first introduced to Canadian audiences in 1997 in the CBC film Pit Pony. His breakout came a decade later in the indie smash Juno, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Hollywood soon came calling, with roles in a blockbuster franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past, a big budget auteur film, Inception, and top billing on Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It.
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Page is also, by any measure, one of the most famous trans people on Earth. If that weren’t exceedingly rare enough, he is also one of very few well-known actors to come out twice: first as gay in 2014, then as trans in 2020. All of this has made Page the subject of intense – and often unwanted – attention. With Pageboy, he’s now taking control of his story.
“I’m getting to reclaim my own narrative, which has been told by other people around me, or perceived by other people around me. Or my job has been to play other people,” the 36-year-old said. “The opportunity to sit down and write this all out, though it was intense in moments, it was very cathartic and healing.”
When Page came out, his character Viktor on Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy followed suit.COURTESY OF NETFLIX/Netflix
Pageboy is, even by the standards of the celebrity memoir, incredibly confessional. Page writes honestly about self-harm, gender dysmorphia, disordered eating, anxiety and his complicated relationship with his family. He also name names, from Michael Musto, the Village Voice columnist who publicly mused about his sexuality after Juno’s release (Page has not received an apology – “I haven’t heard a thing”) to House of Cards actor Kate Mara, whom Page dated while Mara was also dating the actor Max Minghella (Minghella was not only aware of the relationship, but also supportive of it).
The story Page has chosen to tell about himself is ultimately, however, one of queer joy. In Pageboy, he documents his own progress from a closeted young actor who experienced intense dysmorphia to a trans man embracing his visibility. “I really did go from being someone who was pretty uncomfortable all the time in a mind that was occupied and in agony a lot to now, waking up and feeling present and alive in a way that I actually did not think was possible,” Page said.
In person, Page has a tendency to look toward the floor, carefully considering his words and, perhaps, their potential impact. He considers questions with the tilt of a head before answering. Speaking on releasing his book amidst political threats to queer and trans people across North America, Page said, “This environment that we happen to be in right now, I guess for me was a motivator to tell my story. I’ve had this strange life that’s led to this platform that I have and it felt like I did want to grasp the opportunity when it came up.”
He continued, ”When I read trans and queer people’s stories, memoirs and also fiction, it’s meant so much to me. It’s offered me comfort, allowed me to feel reflective, it’s allowed me to release feelings of shame that are swirling in my body, and to know that I’m not alone.”
Page finished the book during lockdown, writing alone in a cabin deep in the woods in Nova Scotia, where he’s from. Though he writes about his Hollywood projects, much of the book is spent documenting his early years in Canada. The stories are accented with Canadiana, from memories of ketchup chip-laced fingers to climbing on the rocks at Peggy’s Cove to snow days announced by soothing CBC radio broadcasters.
Writing about his upbringing, he thoughtfully engages in literary reconciliation, noting the land’s original name, Mi’kma’ki, its 10,000-year history and sharing Mi’kmaq words and their definitions throughout the book. “The very name of where I’m from is Latin for New Scotland, but there’s nothing ‘new’ about it,” he said.
The book also functions as a mixtape of the heyday of Canadian indie rock, with references to Broken Social Scene and a beautiful passage about the freedom Page felt seeing a performance by another queer Canadian icon, the electroclash musician Peaches.
Page’s face lights up when speaking about music; he listened to a lot of ambient music from the 1970s during the writing process, especially the British musician Brian Eno’s seminal records Discreet Music and Music For Airports. He writes that he’s compulsive about songs, listening to them for days or even months. At this moment, he’s got two songs on repeat: Go Home by Angel Olsen and an unreleased song by his friend, the electronic pop musician Star Amerasu, called Discovery, which he promises will be “a hit.”
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Page’s coming out has provided Hollywood an instant reference point for what a trans masculine star could be, but it has also provided a generation of young trans talent a path on which to walk forward. When Page came out, his character Viktor on Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy followed suit.
And behind the scenes, another trans actor was quite literally following in his footsteps. During season three, a non-binary, trans masculine actor named Zack Binder worked as Page’s stand-in, filling in for him between scenes. Binder said Page’s presence as an out trans star has the power to change the roles available to other actors. “This industry works off of references, a ‘Michael Cera type’ or a ‘Seth Rogen’ type. Now there’s one version of a ‘type’ for trans masc actors – an ‘Elliot Page’ type,” Binder said. After standing in for Page, Binder successfully auditioned for an acting role and will play a recurring character in the show’s upcoming fourth season.
Page dug deeply into his own story with Pageboy, but his next chapter is largely about the stories of others. His production company, Page Boy Productions, is currently in post-production on a movie called Backspot starring a queer Indigenous actor, Reservation Dogs breakout Devery Jacobs. Page is also producing a series for Paramount+ called Len and Cub about a secret relationship between two men in 20th-century New Brunswick.
In his author’s note, Page cautions against universalizing his story: “There are an infinite number of ways to be queer and trans, and my story speaks to only one,” he writes. With Page Boy Productions, he’s helping tell more of those stories. “I want more queer and trans narratives,” Page said. “I wouldn’t obviously be here at all without all the queer and trans people who’ve done far more than me, sacrificed far more than me, who don’t have access to the resources that I have that have allowed me to live my life fully.”