T here 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 unlike.