In his new memoir, “Pageboy,” Elliot Page opens up about the difficulties he faced with his gender identity in the years of his career before he came out as trans in December 2020. One was dealing with prejudice and harassment within the industry, as when one A-List actor said “I’m going to fuck you to make you realize you’re not gay.”
Another of those difficulties was having to play femme characters and wear feminine clothing. On one occasion, Page decided he’d had enough and told his agents to turn down a part that required period women’s couture.
“I would imagine myself in a woman’s costume from the mid-nineteenth century. The dress, the shoes, the hair, flashed before my eyes. It was too much after having put on the mask for awards season,” Page wrote, probably of the aftermath of the “Juno” awards campaign in late 2007/early 2008.
“I understood that if I were to do it, I would want to kill myself.”
He said it was a “sought after” role from a “famous book” — a likely candidate is Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” which ultimately starred Mia Wasikowska.
Playing non-male characters was “too much,” and the Netflix series “The Umbrella Academy” even had his female character Vanya Hargreeves come out as a trans man named Viktor in the season immediately following Page’s own coming out. How could he play feminine roles onscreen when the role he “played in [his] personal life was suffocating [him] already.”
“I pushed myself to dispel the truth for fear of banishment, but I was despondent, trapped in a dismal disguise. An empty, aimless shell,” Page said. “It wasn’t easy to explain to my reps that I couldn’t take on a role because of clothing. A face would scrunch up and tilt sideways, ‘But you’re an actor?’ Wardrobe fittings for films ripped at my insides, talons gashing my organs.”
“I cringed at the way people lit up when seeing me in feminine clothing, as if I had accomplished a miraculous feat,” he added.
“People would go, ‘Well, you’re an actor. Just put on the f–king clothes.’ You know? But needless to say, it was so much more than that.”
