Dominic Savage’s work tends to focus on people, usually women, facing some form of disruptive challenge to their everyday life, specific and stressful and never anything but utterly believable. He drew out Gemma Arterton’s greatest performance in 2017’s Toronto premiere The Escape as a deeply unsettled woman wanting out of her responsibilities as wife and mother. His Channel 4 anthology series I Am… has introduced a range of characters at an intersection, from a devastating Vicky McClure grappling with her partner’s emotional abuse to recent Bafta winner Kate Winslet as a mother struggling with a daughter crippled by social media addiction. His preference for often mundane naturalism, with dialogue usually improvised, has teased out grounded, unshowy performances and unusual, instinctive choices from stars often not as accustomed to such free rein.
His Midas touch has now reached out toward Elliot Page, an actor who was once ubiquitous in films such as Juno, Inception, Hard Candy and Drew Barrymore’s sadly under-seen Whip It, but who has been absent from the big screen since 2017. His off-screen transition was brought on-screen in the Netflix fantasy series The Umbrella Academy, one of the streamer’s biggest hits, but outside of that, we’ve seen very little of him as a mature actor. With the release of his memoir Pageboy, giving us insight into the Page we didn’t really know at the height of fame, arrives another form of catharsis. Canadian drama Close to You, made in relative secret earlier this year, is built from a story co-crafted by Savage and Page but features large amounts of improvisation, for better or worse.
