When Christopher Nolan made Memento and Insomnia, it was a veritably different world in a crowd that was shifting away from the classic storytelling style of the robotic 80s and the pulp fiction 90s. But it wasn’t until Leonardo DiCaprio and Elliot Page made their way into one of Nolan’s films that the filmmaker would finally establish himself as the reigning king of the space-time continuum.
Armed with a pint-sized yet explosive army of A-listers in the making, Christopher Nolan set out to revolutionize the movie industry with an IMAX camera and an increasingly ambitious vision.
Elliot Page Got the Shingles Working With Leonardo DiCaprio
With Inception, a small yet significant part of Hollywood’s identity broke apart and broke away from the mainstream genres. All people could think about was the endless possibilities that were now available as far as movies were concerned that did not have to stay limited to horror slashers, crime thrillers, fantasy, and mob dramas. The essential plot of Inception introduced a concept that broke away from the realms of sci-fi and dystopia, too.
In this world of dreams within a dream, the characters comprised Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Cobb and a certain architectural savant played by Elliot Page‘s Ariadne among a cast of other emerging A-listers like Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the evergreen Michael Caine. As filming commenced, it was made very clear that Page’s character, Ariadne would be an integral part of the plot, spending most of her time beside Cobb and his team, helping construct the dream world, and charting out paths to get in and escape.
However, as elated as such a break would make any actor starting out in Hollywood, Page, who at the time went by Ellen Page, felt quite differently:
Shingles popped out of my spine while filming ‘Inception’ when I was 22. Despite everyone being delightful to work with, I felt out of place. In a cast full of cis men, I did not understand the role I found myself in. For the first two weeks of the film I joked I would be recast with Keira Knightley, and rightfully so.
Elliot Page came out as gay at a Human Rights Campaign event held in 2014, four years after the premiere of Inception. In December 2020, Page came out once again as transgender and underwent gender-affirming surgery shortly after.
Elliot Page Opens Up About Anxiety While Filming Inception
Despite Leonardo DiCaprio being one of the most relevant and least problematic actors to work with, it’s not always the biggest star’s cool presence on set that makes everyone feel at ease in their own skin. And that was exactly the case with Elliot Page, who even went on a famous double date with DiCaprio and his mother, during the filming and subsequent premiere of Inception. In his first sit-down interview on television, Page revealed to Oprah about his struggles at the time:
There was so much press and so many premieres all around the world and I was wearing dresses and heels to pretty much every single event. I lost it, it was like a cinematic moment. That night, after the premiere at the after-party, I collapsed. That’s something that’s happened frequently in my life, usually corresponding with a panic attack.
Ultimately, of course, it’s every experience you’ve had since you were a toddler, people saying, ‘The way you’re sitting is not ladylike, you’re walking like a boy. The music you’re listening to as a teenager,’ obviously, the way you dress. Every single aspect of who you are constantly being looked at and put in a box in a very binary system. That’s what it leads to.
The Academy Award-nominated actor, the first man to come out as transgender in Hollywood, and the author of a brilliant, moving, and culturally defining memoir, Pageboy, Elliot Page has remained a constant and vocal activist and supporter of LGBTQ+ issues. The memoir, which was only recently published on June 6, 2023, tells a groundbreaking coming-of-age story about the boy born in a girl’s body, navigating gender dysphoria, his first visit to a queer bar while delivering his Oscar-nominated performance in Juno, and coming to terms with his identity while navigating familial strife.
Source: Pageboy [via Insider]
