The 'Insanely Honest' Ellen Page
It's true: big things really do come in the smallest of packages.
Standing at the top of the steps at the Canne Film Festival, Ellen Page is looking down at a sea of black tuxes soaked in hundreds of flashing bulbs. An angelic gold dress hugs her tiny frame and delicate yellow earrings dangle from her softly made-up face. She looks nothing like the childish figure that first speckled our TVs nearly a decade ago.
The pint-sized Page is all grown up.
That moment last May in France, that moment that required her jewelry have its own bodyguard, that moment that was followed by celebrity-doused parties, and that moment that had Page thinking to herself, "Oh my god, this is unbelievable," just may have been the most surreal moment of her life.
But then, after what felt like just an instant, she was back in Brooklyn, walking to buy groceries with her friends. And that's Page, a down-to-earth Halifax-born girl who catapults into the extreme situations she finds herself wrapped up in, lands on two feet, and somehow stays grounded and modest throughout. When back home in our city, where she can be seen in her well-worn denim and layers of comfy cotton, that girl of the red carpet seems a universe away.
"There's really, in L.A., not a fantastic sense of relativity of what really, maybe, matters," she says. "And when you come home, you just kind of realize what reality is again. I like to just walk around, ride my bike and wash the dishes and pick up my dog's crap and wear the same thing everyday."
Walking around town and minding her own business isn't as easy as it used to be, though. Page is no longer just the local star who started off in the CBC-TV drama Pit Pony at age 10 in 1997, appeared in two episodes of Trailer Park Boys, and popping up in a handful of Canadian film or TV projects. No, instead she is the actor who got her feet wet in Wiebke von Carolsfeld's Marion Bridge and then wowed us years later as the young runaway who celebrated and suffered with a cult-like group of street kids in Mouth to Mouth.
And after a sunnier starring role in the children's movie I Downloaded a Ghost in 2004, a regular spot on a Canadian TV show and another movie with Marion Bridge screenwriter Daniel McIvor, Page captured the undivided attention of her audience with Hard Candy in 2005. This modern film noir transformed Page into the teenage Hayley, an intelligent young girl who lures a pedophile and gets him right where she wants him. The film fostered up buzz among movie-goers, stemming from the controversial questions Hard Candy drummed up and magnified by Page's commanding and exhilarating performance.
"I'm so insanely grateful that I've been able to be that girl," she says. "It was so refreshing to play a character who's 14 and intelligent and passionate."
In the same year, after just graduating from Halifax's Shambhala School, the opportunity to scoop up yet another thrilling role arrived in Page's eager hands. This time, Hayley's signature red hoodie and messenger bag were swapped for a black cat suit and the ability to walk through walls. Joining the mutant team for the franchise's third film X-Men: The Last Stand, Ellen morphed into Kitty Pryde (or Shadowcat) and leapt through fire.
"I actually like the X-Men... to work with those actors and to witness that kind of filmmaking," she says. "It allows me to do a lot of smaller projects that I'm interested in because you have a bit more of a profile."
Her latest silver screen successes have not gone unnoticed back home. You'd be hard-pressed to find a young Haligonian who hasn't at least heard of Ellen Page, and you'll have similar trouble keeping a copy of Hard Candy on the shelves of the video store. And after a few drinks, apparently we're not afraid to show our love for the tiny actor from our hometown.
"When I walk around or when I go out at night, people aren't very hesitant when they're drunk and they're like, 'Oh, you're that chick from...!'" she says. "I'm not used to it."
But she insists the fame, cat suits, fire-jumping and red carpets haven't gone to her head. Instead, she thinks anyone's assumption that she's any different than the Ellen Page who grew up in this city is merely a projection of what they think they see.
"I think a lot of people expect all of a sudden I dress nicer or, I don't know, Aaron Carter's my boyfriend or something," she says, laughing. "I think people project a lot that you change.
"I don't feel like I've changed other than like anyone who goes through any experience probably feels like they've taken something away from it. I'm just still, just kicking around."
A quick glance at these experiences - exhausting journeys of uncovering the dark emotions of her characters - and you're surprised she hasn't taken away even more. Sparked from when she played Joanie in Marion Bridge, when she first experienced a feeling of transition through the body and the mind whilst acting, Page lets herself be utterly exposed in her roles.
"It's the feeling of letting go but being insanely honest at the same time because you're just, almost being transparent and fading into this imaginary world that I guess is in your mind," she says.
For Page, of all the imaginary worlds she's faded into, assuming the role of Sylvia Likens in Tommy O'Haver's An American Crime was the hardest. The film, currently in the post-production stages, is based on the true story of a teenage girl who was locked in a basement and tortured to death in Indiana in 1965. The film took a toll on Page both mentally and physically, she says, and as she portrayed the 16-year-old girl who underwent inconceivable pain, she didn't have the comfort of a fictitious character to fall back on.
"To go to a place of just so much pain and so much fear and so much, just, dehumanization, and not being able to combat that with, 'Oh this is just a screenplay that someone has conjured up,'" she says. "The fact that this girl is now inside of you and you're going through what someone actually went through, and it's just truly, truly unimaginable."
But that sort of feeling is what Page relishes in. When working with a script that she describes as "really real," it doesn't matter how outlandish, extreme or dark it is, because if it's honest, she'll connect with it. And as she lets herself go and dives into the difficult characters she chooses to portray, she observes how the experience is affecting her and learns from it.
"It's like, this is sick because this is kind of why I do it, because you get to do all this crazy shit," she says. "I just adore being able to go into the darkest parts of yourself and have the justification to bring it out, which our society really doesn't often allow us to do, to connect to really ridiculous emotion.
"And I get paid to do that. I get paid to visit pain in my body."
The Tracey Fragments, director Bruce McDonald's film currently churning through the post-production stages, also tapped into Page's love for the "insanely honest." The script by Maureen Medved, which comes from her novel of the same name, tells the story of the traumatized and teenaged Tracey Berkowitz, her naked body wrapped in a shower curtain, sitting at the back of the bus. The film, which was shot over 14 days in late February and early March of this year, depends on Page's portrayal of the teenage girl, as The Tracey Fragments is a memory piece that's told and seen entirely through her perspective.
"I read the book and read the script and just loved it, and had never read something like that," she says. "It's kind of really extreme in this unbelievably honest way, like what it's actually like in your mind as a teenage girl to just be figuring it out. Everything is nonstop, everything is black and white and kinetic and nothing is linear."
In addition to a role in Kari Skogland's Stone Angel, look forward (way forward) to Ellen Page with a smile on her face. Under the direction of Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), Page will become Juno, an offbeat young woman who finds herself pregnant and makes some unusual decisions - and the title character of a comedy scheduled to start filming in January.
"It's a comedy and that's my dream role because I'm so excited to do something that has more brightness in it that still feels really honest and great," she says. "It's a role that has been around for a while that I had been fighting for."
Evidently a lover of honest scripts, real characters and all things film, Page is admittedly obsessed with her art form and often finds herself bringing a little fraction of her characters and their stories home. But who could blame her? At not even 20 years old, the young actor has mastered roles that many would dream to even tackle, and she dives right in from head to toe. And beyond using these exhausting characters to indulge in her own fascination in exploring deep emotions, Page hopes to spark reactions in others with the stories she tells.
"You get excited when you go through something and someone sees it and they have this really intense emotional response, whether it's negative or positive - they're both great because you're just provoking people," she says. "I love film, and it's an art form and art should provoke."
http://www.filly.ca/entertainment/centre_stage/film/Honesty-Of-Ellen-Page.asp
