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The actress and activist does not have time for questions about whether she's worried she'll be "typecast" for playing queer.Â
After decades in the entertainment industry and nearly six years since she came out as gay, Ellen Page is definitely not worried about being "typecast." Not only does she find the question somewhat reductive, as she expressed during a panel at the Toronto International Film Festival, she'd be "thrilled" if she only ever played queer for the rest of her career, according to NBC.
During a panel at TIFF for her directorial debut, the documentary There's Something in the Water -- about indigenous and African Nova Scotian women fighting to protect their land -- Page said she's often asked if she's "worried about being typecast."
"You would never ask a heterosexual actress that [about] being typecast as straight," Page said. "Why would I not want to play those roles? Quite frankly, I would be thrilled if it's every role I ever played again!"
Page, 32, came out at a youth event in 2014 and has since played queer in films and on TV in Freeheld, My Days of Mercy, and Netflix's Tales of the City.
An avid LGBTQ activist behind Viceland's documentary series Gaycation, Page came out well into her career and had already been nominated for an Oscar for Juno. At TIFF she spoke about the pressure she felt to remain closeted when she was younger.
"I came out when I was 27 years old. Like, what? I wasn't talking about who I was and being my authentic self because I was an actress in Hollywood," Page said. "That's absurd. We need to look at these things as absurd."
While Page felt forced to remain closeted, she was also harassed for her sexual identity. At the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017, Page wrote openly about the homophobia and harassment she faced at the hands of her X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner. She wrote about an incident that occurred at a meet-and-greet with cast and crew for the movie.
"He [Ratner] looked at a woman standing next to me, ten years my senior, pointed to me and said: 'You should fuck her to make her realize she's gay,'" Page wrote of Ratner. "I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself. I knew I was gay but did not know, so to speak. I felt violated when this happened. I looked down at my feet, didn't say a word and watched as no one else did either."
