ELLEN PAGE
The Hollywood actor on why she isn’t here for any of your anti-LGBTQ religious bullshit.
The out Hollywood actor talks on The Umbrella Academy and why she isn’t here for any of your anti-LGBTQ religious bullshit.
Ellen Page has been really busy. Along with promoting a new TV show for Netflix, over the past few weeks the Canadian actor has made headlines by giving an impassioned speech on American television against Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the devastating ramifications of hate speech, and used Twitter to take aim at the infamous and allegedly anti-LGBTQ, Justin Bieber-endorsed Christian group, Hillsong Church. It’s meant that trying to pin down a time to chat to Ellen for this interview has proven difficult – she’s been preoccupied putting the world to rights!
Having spent over half her life in the film industry, Page, now 31, almost sees her denouncement and displacement of bigotry as a duty. Early in her career, she caught immediate attention thanks her immense acting ability, but also because of the roles she took on. Aged 17 she starred in Hard Candy, a subversive film about a 14-year-old vigilante paedophile hunter, and soon got cast in the third film in the X-Men franchise. However, it was her turn as the sharp, vulnerable and sardonic titular character in Juno that truly propelled her career, netting her a nomination for Best Actress at the 2008 Oscars in the process (she was, at the time, the youngest actress to ever be nominated for the award). Ellen Page wasn’t just a young talent but a great one, too.
While roles in Christopher Nolan’s Inception and another go around the Marvel track with X-Men: Days of Future Past kept Page’s career growing, the bi¡est and most significant sea change in her professional life came in 2014 during a speech at a Human Rights Campaign Time to Thrive conference benefitting LGBTQ youth. Page came out as a lesbian. “I’m here today because I am gay,” she said, “and because maybe I can make a difference, to help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility.” Later, in an interview with Time in 2015, Page said that coming out made every “cell in my body transform”. W hereas before she described herself as a “little flame that was barely flickering anymore”, being honest and open about her identity made her “happier than I ever could have imagined” and “excited about life”.
The transformative nature of discovering your potential after acknowledging and owning your identity is a theme of Page’s latest project, Netflix’s 10-episode series The Umbrella Academy, an adaptation of the comic book series written by former My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way and Brazilian comic book artist Gabriel Bá. The show follows a group of seven children with supernatural abilities all born on the same day in 1989 by immaculate conception, who are later adopted by the enigmatic billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves and raised in an dysfunctional and brutal household as a superhero crime fighting squad. Page plays Vanya (aka Number Seven), the only one of the adopted siblings who appears to possess no special powers. As a result of this, and the rejection and abuse she suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, as an adult Vanya is shy, meek and almost invisible. Sure, it might sound a bit like X-Men, but it isn’t.
“I totally understand when people bring it up or paper the similarities,” Page says over the phone from the back of a taxi when, after a lot of back-andforth, we finally chat, “but it’s a weird thing to even relate them. They’re nothing alike. Nor are my experiences in them. I’m barely in those X-Men movies. Those are very specific kinds of movies and they do a very specific things. Some of them are good and others,” she pauses for a laugh, “aren’t.”
Instead, Page says, the focus of The Umbrella Academy is about family. “For these characters, being a superhero has ultimately been nothing but damaging. They’re basically a bunch of stru¡ling child stars, in a way. I think that it’s all these elements that make this project so new and multi-layered.”
Indeed, the show really is about understanding your potential, both as a superhero and as a human being. “A lot of superhero narratives, particularly in this show, are so much about feeling like an outsider then going on a journey where you have to discover your own power,” Page says. “I think a lot of people in the LGBTQ community can relate that.”
“Vanya’s experience is similar to that,” Page continues, noting that it was this that drew her to the role. “Her experience aligns with any repressed element of yourself that you’re trying to deal with. Of course, she doesn’t necessarily get the support that one reaches out for in that situation. For me, when I was going through that in my life, I was lucky that I had the ability to reach out to a therapist. I had people who I could actively work through that pain with.”
Given that popular culture is saturated with superhero stories, The Umbrella Academy stands out because of how it approaches queerness. While Page’s character doesn’t appear to be LGBTQ, one of the siblings, Klaus, played expertly by Irish actor Robert Sheehan, is. Refreshingly, it’s a complete non-issue, and while important to his character it’s not the defining aspect, which is actually the fact that he can commune and call upon the dead. It was another aspect that made Page grateful for the project.
“There is a lack of queer narratives in superhero universes, but also the very narrow idea of how a woman can look in those movies,” she posits, noting