She'd be happy farming
Critical raves haven't turned the head of young Halifax actress
Ellen Page, in jeans and sneakers, is curled up in a chair, reading the astrology column in a fashion magazine. She doesn't look much like the darling of the Toronto film festival, the star of three movies, including one for which she has been anointed by film critic Roger Ebert as a good bet for an Oscar.
"You are entering the realm of serious commitment," says her horoscope (she's a Pisces), but that can be interpreted several ways. Page, who is 20, says that if things don't work out, she would be just as happy as an organic farmer in Nova Scotia.
"I have other interests, you know. I love camping and I love reading and playing guitar. A lot of the time I think people attach their happiness to doing whatever they're doing. As human beings we're so obsessed with our weird idea of what success is and kind of get lost in looking at the future - which sucks."
And her idea of success? "Getting to a place where I feel genuinely in the moment, I guess. I don't know. And losing all judgment. Being compassionate. All of those wonderful things that aren't easy."
For now, though, Page has a different challenge. She's the star of Juno, a comedy about a high school girl who gets pregnant - a film that won standing ovations in Toronto and earned her the Breakthrough Artist of the Year award at the Hollywood Film Festival. Ebert predicts an Oscar.
She's also featured in The Stone Angel, based on the Margaret Laurence novel, and stars in The Tracey Fragments, an experimental film by Bruce McDonald about a teenager whose life is falling apart. The latter movie features a split-screen technique that mirrors the heroine's deteriorating mental state.
The trio of movies has thrown Page back into the publicity grind that she last experienced two years ago with Hard Candy, an acclaimed performance in which she portrayed a teenager who lures a pedophile through the Internet.
That round of publicity left her wondering where the time went, which she calls "so not a healthy thing to think of at the age of 20." To recover, she went backpacking through eastern Europe.
"I just took a bunch of time off. I was so far removed from all this. It's interesting how you can be so far removed and just be thrown back into it."
She's thrilled by the fact that people respond to her movies, she says, because it might encourage people to keep hiring her. That seems like a good bet.
McDonald says Page is the "grounding force" of The Tracey Fragments. "A lesser actress, the style could completely overwhelm the emotional heart of what the story's ultimately about."
Page says she feels compassion for a fearless girl like Tracey, whom we meet, dressed only in a shower curtain, riding the bus and searching for her missing little brother. She's a girl who is bullied at school, an outsider whose boyfriend is mostly a fantasy.
Page, who was born and raised in Halifax, says she can relate. "If you're at all different, you're judged for it," she says - and you fall into the trap of judging yourself by the standards of others.
Acting does give her a chance to enter the minds of a variety of people - a troubled teenager, say, or the levitating genius Kitty Pryde in X-Men 3, or in her next film, Jack and Diane, a lesbian teenage werewolf - and learn not to judge them. "You just have to connect your heart to them," she says. "We're all just scared and trying to live."
If you ask her if she could get by without acting, she answers "yes" almost before you finish the question.
"And that's one thing I feel really comfortable about right now, and made myself realize by taking time off," she says. "I'm not going to attach my happiness to this because it just isn't real. ... I love doing it and I'm so obscenely grateful for it, but it's extremely fragile and it could fall apart at any second. I would be okay with it. There's other things I'm interested in doing."
One of those things would be self-sufficiency - "start an organic-farming commune or something. It's kind of a cliché thing to say, maybe. Wouldn't it be great to be self-sufficient?"
The young actress being touted for an Academy Award becomes most animated in talking about the farmers' market in Halifax, where she buys almost all her food when she's in town. She's an advocate of the 100-mile diet, the food movement that encourages people to eat locally.
"It's a good challenge and I really like simple food, so I don't mind eating the same thing every day. Give me my free-range chicken and my bok choy."
