The last time Elliot Page appeared in a film, it was literally a car crash. Page, who was nominated for an Oscar at the age of 20 for the teen-pregnancy comedy Juno, was starring in a remake of the Julia Roberts thriller Flatliners, playing one of a group of medical students who engineer near-death experiences to get a peek at the afterlife. His co-stars included James Norton, Diego Luna and Kiersey Clemons, but during a hazardous driving scene it was only Page and Clemons who were not given seatbelts. Stunt coordinators told them: “You’ll be fine.”
Instead, they were traumatised. In his 2023 memoir Pageboy, the Canadian actor describes the shoot as “a shitshow”. It wasn’t merely the cavalier regard for his safety. He also had pressure put on him to look stereotypically feminine, and one senior crew member asked whether he was angry that his character was straight.
That was seven years ago. Page, who came out as transgender in 2020, has been seen on television in the interim, including a recurring role on superhero series The Umbrella Academy, where his character transitioned, too. Page’s return to cinema has been a long time coming but he could scarcely have chosen a better re-entry point than Close to You. It’s a thrillingly intimate drama in which he plays Sam, a trans man drawn back to his Canadian home town for his father’s birthday. His well-intentioned family try their best to be welcoming and upbeat, but the conditions in their acceptance of him soon start to show.
Page must have been biding his time for a movie this meaningful. Presumably he felt his return to cinema needed to double as a statement. Right? “Gosh, maybe I should think about things more that way,” the 37-year-old says bashfully. “But it was really organic. Before finally coming out as trans, I wasn’t feeling so inspired. I didn’t feel right for certain reasons, as you can imagine. But then to be connected with Dominic …”
That is a reference to Dominic Savage, the 61-year-old director of Close to You. A videocall with the pair of them is a tale of two cities, and two sitting rooms. Page, in a charcoal T-shirt, is in his New York home, a minimalist vision of cream walls and white curtains. Savage, wearing a knotted neckerchief and chunky Ronnie Barker-style glasses, is in London in what resembles an upmarket bric-a-brac shop. A pair of Baftas preside from the mantelpiece over a cluttered landscape of lamps, chairs and cushions.
“I was aware of Elliot when we were introduced,” he says of the actor, who appeared in blockbusters including Inception and the X-Men franchise. “But part of the process for me in making films is to be able to see inside someone.” The first work of Savage’s that Page saw was I Am Kirsty, part of his I Am … series of character studies of women for Channel 4. This one starred Samantha Morton, whom Page already worshipped for her performance in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar. Is his character in Close to You named Sam in tribute to her? “I didn’t think of that until now,” says Page. “I kind of love it. That’s awesome. Dominic?”
“Here’s a little secret,” says Savage with the sheepishness of someone poised to rain on his friend’s parade. “Behind my computer here, there’s a whole load of CDs and that’s how I name my characters. Sam must be Sam Cooke. I do think quite musically. I don’t want to sound pretentious but there’s a kind of musicality to my films, as there is to life.”
Music has been with Savage from an early age. His late father was an organist at a bandstand in Margate, the Kent coastal town where he was raised. The director’s first film experience was in front of the camera, not behind it. At 11 years old, he was cast in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon as the young Lord Bullingdon, who grows up to challenge his stepfather to a duel. Discovering that Savage was an accomplished pianist, Kubrick packed him off on the US chatshow circuit to promote the film by playing selections from the soundtrack. On the day we speak, Savage is preparing to fly to Dublin for a screening of that 1975 masterpiece. “You should dress up like your character!” says Page.
But Savage’s musical point is well made. His method of working – building the initial story with his lead actor, shaping the cast’s improvisations without writing any dialogue, and shooting everything with a handheld camera in natural light – has resulted in a body of work that moves to natural, soulful rhythms. From the improvisatory process miracles of naturalism emerge, such as the moment when Sam’s sweet but twitchy mother, played by Wendy Crewson, accidentally misgenders him. Was that a genuine slip of the tongue?
“It was!” laughs Page. “I feel weird because I get misgendered all the time, and I don’t care unless someone’s trying to, you know …” He wrinkles his nose to indicate dubious motives. “I want to be clear: I wouldn’t correct Wendy as me. I’d be like: ‘It’s fine. We’re going to move on from the moment. It takes a second.’ But, you know, I’m not me. I’m Sam here. And that moment was so perfect because that’s what happens.” Page’s own mother does her best, he says. “She’s pretty good. I’m like, ‘Of course, it’s going to take you a second, mom. It’s fine. You don’t need to beat yourself up about it!’”
Close to You is manifestly not the story of Page’s own life. Whereas Sam’s father is kind, even if he doesn’t always spring to his son’s defence as readily as he might, the family portrait in Pageboy is less rosy. Page writes of the cruelty of his stepmother during his childhood, and the hurtfulness of his father, who later “liked” a social media post from Jordan Peterson, despite the rightwinger having once been expelled from Twitter in its pre-Elon Musk days for deadnaming and misgendering Page. “To be frank, it is hard to imagine a relationship with them again,” the actor wrote of those family members.
But there are points of overlap between Sam’s life and his own. Page and Hillary Baack, who co-stars as Sam’s almost-sweetheart from his school days, really are longtime friends: they met on the 2013 thriller The East, and never lost touch. Baack tells me by email that she and Page have “remained curious and genuinely care about each other. Compared to when I first met Elliot, he is much calmer, more grounded. I can feel a weight having lifted, and a real joy for life emerge with more freedom and colour than I’ve seen before.”
Another crossover is the red woolly hat that Sam wears for most of the film. In Pageboy, he writes of being told as a young actor in Hollywood to “take off your hat”, another push toward gender conformity. Now he wears it proudly throughout Close to You. Deliberate or coincidental? “I think a bit of both. A hat is, and has been throughout my life, some kind of gender marker for me. And now it’s like: ‘Oh yeah, I can do this. And it’s not an issue. It’s not going to turn into a long conversation.’” Arguably the most radical moment in the film occurs when Sam has taken all he can of the domestic tensions. “Family is not the most important thing,” he announces. For queer and trans people, the pressure to placate or conform to a family who may not have your best interests at heart means putting up with aggressions of the micro and macro variety. Close to You suggests it is perfectly reasonable simply to opt out.
“I don’t write those lines, so things are said that are really meant,” says Savage of his improvisatory process. “The actors aren’t acting any more. Elliot reacted in that organic way and it was rather perfect and beautiful. I liked the surprise of it. I remember us at the time saying to each other: ‘That was important.’” Page beams proudly. “You could feel something happen,” he says. “And yeah, we’re not actually used to a queer trans person having a boundary in that moment: ‘Hey, I actually don’t want to sit here and this isn’t good for me.’”
That resonates with Savage, who is a father of three adult daughters. “I get it. We find our families in all kinds of places, don’t we? They’re not necessarily the people that we’ve grown up with and that we were born to. Some people, I imagine, would think that was heresy, but I find it quite a liberating idea.”
The scarcity of trans narratives puts undue pressure on the ones that get made to tell everybody’s stories. But trans film-makers including Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli (So Pretty) have spoken of their frustration at the emphasis on the educational in trans cinema and an obligation for those films to be easily understood by cisgender audiences. Close to You is not guilty of that, but Page isn’t oblivious to the complaint.
“It can, of course, be tiresome,” he says. “But I also try my best when I’m doing press to be like: ‘I understand that you don’t know a trans person, so let’s talk about it …’ The vast majority of people don’t personally know a trans person, or don’t think they do. That helps to spread the lies about our lives, about our healthcare, about who we are – and to then have those lies utilised for nefarious means.”
Close to You can only help, though any good intentions would count for little if it wasn’t also a complex work: wise about how we balance our duties to ourselves and others, devout but unsentimental in its portrait of romance, and with a brave, bold lead performance that deserves to shock a temporarily flatlined film career back to life.
• Close to You is in UK cinemas from 30 August.
