Juno star Elliot Page’s new memoir, Pageboy, is an expansive trip through the actor’s life that covers everything from his journey as a trans celebrity, to his contentious relationship with his bullying stepmother, who gave him the cruel nickname “Skid Mark,” to the complicated romantic affairs that carried him through the toughest times in his professional life.
Already, it’s been revealed by People that Page had a secret romance in 2014 with actress Kate Mara; the relationship was co-signed by Max Minghella, Mara’s boyfriend at the time.
But in Pageboy, which has been reviewed in full by The Daily Beast, Page divulges another previously unknown relationship.
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While filming Juno, the 2007 Diablo Cody dramedy that made him a household name, Page details a behind-closed-doors affair with co-star Olivia Thirlby.
“I was taken aback the moment I saw Olivia Thirlby,” Page writes. “We stood in her hotel room. Billie Holliday played. She was about to start making lunch, when she looked directly at me and said point-blank, ‘I’m really attracted to you.’ ‘Uh, I’m really attracted to you, too.’ At that we started sucking face. It was on... we started having sex all the time: her hotel room, in our trailers at work, once in a tiny, private room in a restaurant.”
“Ironically, playing a pregnant teenager was one of the first times I felt a modicum of autonomy on set,” Page added. “I was wearing a fake belly but not being hyperfeminized. For me, Juno was emblematic of what could be possible, a space beyond the binary.”
In a particularly heartbreaking passage, Page describes being sexually assaulted at the age of 18 by an unnamed female crew member who had offered to take Page apartment hunting.
“I was standing in the empty living room, in front of the couch, when I felt her grab me,” Page writes. “She pressed her face into mine, some version of kissing. The next thing I knew I was on the rug, the floor firm on my back. I didn’t say no, I did not resist, I just stiffened. Lying on the carpet, I didn’t make a sound. She began to dry hump me, at first slow, then faster and faster, her body on top of me, the weight grinding my spine into the floor. Her eyes were closed, head turned away from me, face perspiring. She huffed and puffed and began to moan. I didn't move, just stared up at the ceiling, then closed my eyes, then looked up again as she came. It was only the second time I had kissed a woman and the first time I had ever seen one come in person.”
As a teenager, Page was also groomed by a director.
“His frequent texts made me feel special, as did the books he gifted me. He took me to dinner at Swan on Queen West. Stroking my thigh under the table, he whispered: ‘You have to make the move, I can’t.’”
Page also says he suffered a transphobic attack in the spring of 2022 on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
A tall man Page locked eyes with while the actor was heading to a convenience store, Page writes, and began screaming at him: “I’m going to fucking gay bash you, faggot! This is why I need a gun!” Page writes that he managed to narrowly evade harm with the aid of the convenience store employees.
On the brighter side, Page was once set up on a date by Leonardo DiCaprio...
“While filming Inception, a friend of Leonardo DiCaprio’s visited and we had a lovely connection,” Page writes. “Peter was warm to everyone, eyes beaming with care. When I saw Leo next, I told him I liked his friend, to which he responded that his friend liked me, too. For our first date we went to Universal Studios with Leo and his mother. Peter and I sat close on the rides, our thighs just touching.”
But he also found the Inception set to be a pressure-cooker.
“Shingles popped out of my spine while filming Inception when I was 22,” Page added. “In a cast full of cis men, I did not understand the role I found myself in. Despite everyone being delightful to work with, I felt out of place. For the first two weeks of the film I joked I would be recast with Keira Knightly, and rightfully so. Shingles communicated the stress my body felt, what my words could not.”
