The 36-year-old transgender actor is opening up in his new memoir, 'Pageboy.'
Elliot Page isn't holding back in his new memoir, Pageboy. The 36-year-old Juno star opens up about his journey transitioning from female to male and the struggles the transgender actor has faced throughout his life.
From an early age, Page writes he was a victim of abuse and grooming. Saying an unnamed director "groomed" him as a teenager, Page writes that this person texted him regularly and gifted him books.
Page writes that one night the director took Page to dinner and stroked his thigh under the table.
"You have to make the move, I can’t," Page claims the director whispered to him, per USA Today.
Page also talks about his struggles with Hollywood's representation of queer and trans characters being played by actors who are not members of the community.
"I was being told to lie and hide. It puzzled me to watch cis straight actors play queer and trans characters and be revered. Nominations, wins, people exclaiming, ‘How brave!'" Page writes. "Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back. Hollywood doesn’t lead the way, it responds, it follows, slowly and far behind. The depth of that closet, the trove of secrets buried, indifferent to the consequences. I was punished for being queer while I watched others be protected and celebrated, who gleefully abused people in the wide open."
Page also points to a 2014 incident shortly after he came out as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
While at a party, Page writes that "one of the most famous actors in the world" was drunk at the soiree and criticized him for coming out as gay.
"'That doesn’t exist. You aren’t gay. You are just afraid of men,'" Page says the actor told him. Page also accuses the unnamed actor of threatening to "f**k" him to make him "realize you aren't gay."
Page writes that he locked himself in a bathroom to escape. Days later, Page says that the actor apologized to him at the gym, claiming he had no memory of the comments.
The memoir also touches on Page's fractured relationship with his father, Dennis, whom he hasn't spoken to in more than five years. In the book, Page writes that his dad engages with "those with massive platforms who have attacked and ridiculed me on a global scale."
He specifically points to Jordan Peterson's tweets, which got him suspended from Twitter in June 2022. Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist, was suspended from the platform for commenting on Page's physical transformation making transphobic remarks. "When Jordan Peterson was let back on Twitter after he’d made a horrific tweet about me, he posted a video, just his head filling the frame," Page wrote in his memoir. "Staring menacingly into the camera, he said, 'We’ll see who cancels who.' My dad 'liked' it."
As for what Page's father thinks of him now, the Umbrella Academy star remains in the dark.
"I have no clue what my father thinks of his son at this point, what he says, how he explains my absence," Page writes.
As for his relationship with his mother, Martha Phillpotts, the actor is proud of where they stand today.
"People can surprise you," Page writes. "We’ve never been closer, and her willingness to change and grow and move through the discomfort has been powerful and inspiring. She’s become my ally. She loves her son endlessly. I’m lucky to have that, to feel such profound and genuine love. What was the most beautiful and meaningful was to watch her bloom as her old narratives and doctrines faded."
Pageboy is available now wherever books are sold.
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