cover story - ELLEN PAGE

Hot out of Halifax

Who could have predicted that America’s newest teen sweetheart would be a pregnant punk played by an iconoclastic Canadian?

But Ellen Page’s lead role in the surprise indie smash Juno has turned the 5’1” Halifax native, and still resident, into Hollywood’s It Girl.

Page has earned an Oscar nomination, won praise for the role literally left and right (conservatives have lauded Juno’s decision to have her baby and put it up for adoption, liberals more tentatively appreciate that the girl makes all of her own choices) and even been linked to a Spears scandal, with some absurdly accusing Juno of having an influence on Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy.

Can higher Teen Queen status possibly be achieved?

For Page, who just turned 21, it’s all beside the point. She is far too earthy, serious-minded and, well, Canadian to want exploding fame to affect her much.

But she’s also realistic enough to realize that it may.

“It does in the sense that I’m away a lot,” says Page, who insists she’ll keep living in Halifax. “Other than that, not so much. I’m obviously still the same. But we’ll probably be able to tell more soon. We’ll see what happens.”

It will be instructive to see if Page’s sharp, offbeat humour proves as popular with audiences of her next indie release, Smart People, which revolves around a sad, dysfunctional family, and debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film is scheduled to open across North America on April 14th.

“I play a character who is extremely different from Juno, which is exciting,” Page enthuses during a recent interview at the Los Angeles Four Seasons Hotel. “She’s an extremely bitchy, arrogant Young Republican. It was a blast to shoot. It’s not a political movie, though, more a slice of life. It was produced by Michael London who produced Sideways, and directed by a wonderful director named Noam Murro. It’s kind of a dramedy, or whatever you want to call it.”

It took a while for the young actor to figure out that she was also an artist. Page’s filmography is filled with edgy indie titles — Hard Candy, Mouth to Mouth, The Tracey Fragments, An American Crime — all of which cover alarming territory.

Not that she’s above a little lowbrow comedy or a good effects movie. Page made the requisite, multi-episode appearance as Treena Lahey on the Halifax-produced phenomenon Trailer Park Boys, and she did teenage-mutant duty in X-Men: The Last Stand as Kitty Pride, who can walk through walls and other solid materials.

“When I started, I wasn’t really conscious of what was going on,” she recalls. “I just was happy to memorize lines and ride ponies and things. Then, as I continued to work and started playing more mature roles that required depth and passion and some sort of emotional transcendence, it began to connect.

That was about when I was 15 or 16.

Probably the first film I shot that had a quality of depth was called Marion Bridge, Molly Parker starred in it.

“It was almost a moment that’s, like, inexplicable that happened. It was kind of, ‘Oh, I wanna feel that again!’ And I just wanted to learn more and take it much more seriously.”

Ellen’s mom and dad, a teacher and a graphic designer respectively, were apparently the perfect stage parents: i.e., not like the stereotypes at all.

“My parents just want me to remain balanced and healthy and stay the same grounded human being that I am,” she says. “They’re incredibly supportive but they never push me. It always is just about my personal being, and I adore them for that. It’s a perfect kind of a situation. We just trust each other.”

Between acting gigs, the teenaged Page would try to keep her life as normal as she could. Wait, make that better than normal.

“My high school [was] called Shambhala and it was started by Buddhists,” she explains. “They don’t teach you Buddhism, but the way the school works stems from the philosophy. It’s about openness. It was one of those weird situations where you didn’t feel like anyone was judging anyone. It was about harvesting individuals’ desire to learn, and talking about and learning about whatever, not being censored — learning about things that, maybe, in public school, teachers would be fired for.”

And though she was small, Page was a total jock. She grew up playing a lot of sports, soccer competitively. As she puts it, “I like being in my body.”

That active nature made her into an outdoorsy person, and it was during a European hiking trip that Page realized there is no place like home. It’s not that anything bad happened; but something just clicked, and it made her reassess Nova Scotia as both a refuge from Hollywood and as something more.

“I just genuinely love it. I never thought that’s where I would end up, but I’m feeling like it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” she says of keeping Nova Scotia’s capital as her home base. “When I was backpacking in Eastern Europe — which was amazing — I also realized that, ‘My God, I love where I’m from.’ I think being there, in a community that’s just so far removed from the film industry, just people working and doing their thing, it’s humbling and it keeps your feet on the ground and keeps your perspective balanced.”

As for Canada in general, Page is proud of the nation’s progressive attributes. But she knows enough about how the world works to acknowledge that, “As much as I love Canada and love that we have access to health care and things like that, and there are a lot of wonderful things, we live a comfortable lifestyle and still live on this very imperialistic side of the world. To live well, bad things must happen, and Canada isn’t some innocent, peace-crazy country, you know what I mean? I’m aware of that, and it’s something I do want to be aware of. But I do love where I’m from and I love a lot of the things that we stand for.”

Next up: playing a lesbian werewolf opposite Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby in Jack and Diane and a beauty queen turned roller derby bruiser in Whip It, directed by Drew Barrymore, of all people. Like we said, Page doesn’t exactly follow the mainstream. But there was nothing mainstream about Juno until everybody fell in love with her, either.

However huge any future project may become, don’t be surprised if you run into Ellen Page, just chilling out and collecting herself on the street in Halifax.

“I definitely need time between roles,” she explains. “You need moments to breathe and connect your feet to the ground and what have you. I feel like if you don’t have your own individual life then you’re just going to burn out.”

Bob Strauss is an L.A.-based entertainment writer.

Whopper of a role

The audition process doesn’t always involve a big dark room with a director and casting agent. After seeing Ellen Page in the indie film Hard Candy, Smart People director Noam Murro liked her for the role of overachieving Vanessa. So the two met not in Hollywood, but at a Burger King at the Newark Airport. Page flew in from Canada, Murrow from Pittsburgh. Murrow quickly realized she was the one, but it had nothing to do with their conversation or the way she ate her Whopper. As he recalls, “I saw her small figure and frame walking towards me and I just knew in that instant that she was the genius I was looking for.”