‘I don’t want to sound like a piece of poop, but … ‘
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
You wonder if she can really be almost 21, and that maybe IMDb has got her digits the wrong way round - until she opens her mouth. Then, apart from her habit of throwing the odd “poop” or “friggin’” into the mix, her well-argued and eloquent opinions on everything from the tyranny of the patriarchy to the misrepresentation of youth in the media - not to mention her jaw-dropping reading list (she has recently enjoyed Intelligence in Nature by the anthropologist Jeremy Narby, which muses about whether plants are intelligent) - leave you in no doubt you are talking to an adult. When we meet she has just been nominated for an Oscar - for her performance in the title role of Juno - in the Best Actress category alongside the likes of Julie Christie and Cate Blanchett. But there is no squealing, no OTT oh-my-God-ing you might hear from her peers. She simply says the nomination is “hard to fathom” and that everyone but her deserves to win, especially Laura Linney, who she thinks is “flawless”.This paradoxical mix of child and adult goes some way to explaining why Page is the talk of the town after Juno. As the film’s director Jason Reitman has put it: “She’s a wonderful combination of an intellect far beyond her years, and yet there are qualities of hers that are still a young girl, and those qualities charm the pants off you. She’s a perfect combo.” With this perfect combo, she is reminiscent of Natalie Portman - of whom Page declares herself “profoundly jealous … in a good way. Did you know she can speak FIVE languages?”In Juno, Page plays the eponymous heroine, a mouthy 16-year-old named, as the character is at pains to put it, not after the town in Alaska, but in homage to Zeus’s wife: “Supposedly she was beautiful and really mean. Kind of like Diana Ross.” Juno gets pregnant after deciding, when there is nothing good on telly that night, to have sex with Michael Cera’s bumbling athletics geek, Bleeker.Page’s face will be new to many British cinemagoers, but she started acting before she even left primary school, when she got a lead role in the Canadian TV series Pit Pony. She first attracted the attention of critics in a big way with the film Hard Candy in 2005, when she played a scary 14-year-old who subverts expectations when she meets a man twice her age over the internet, and then as a bodysuited mutant in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. We’ll be seeing a lot more of her soon. As well as Juno, there is the comedy Smart People, in which she stars alongside Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid, and she has just signed on to play a beauty-queen turned roller-derby vamp in Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It!Just like Page, Juno looks every inch the moody teen in hoodie and baggy jeans, but - bar the use of “forshizz” and “ick” and “fuckity-OWW!” - has the vocabulary of an adult. Juno gets the kind of lines that could win any argument, the sort the rest of us only think of hours, days or weeks after the event. When she is bickering with Bleeker about the conception, and it looks as though he is going to have the last word by telling her that he has kept her knickers as a memento, she, without missing a beat, says, “I still have your virginity.” Or when she outstays her welcome at the house of the couple she has chosen to adopt her baby and they suggest her parents might be worried about her, and she says, “Nah … I mean, I’m already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?”It was precisely because Juno’s screenwriter, former stripper Diablo Cody, had given Juno such sassy dialogue (think Buffy, think My So-Called Life, think Dawson’s Creek before it got schmaltzy) that Page took the part. She doesn’t accept the criticisms that Juno and her pals are too clever by half. “I don’t speak the same way as Juno, but I definitely had my own language with my friends and in that sense I could relate to that,” she says.Page thinks everyone underestimates modern teens. “We are so used to seeing one idea of what a young man or woman is in the popular media,” she says, adding that it is “suffocating” how homogeneously young people are represented on screen. She wants to know if we have Laguna Beach in the UK, the OC rip-off about beautiful young airheads in California. “If you like that, awesome. I don’t want to sound like a judgmental piece of poop. But we need other options, you know?”In offering an alternative perspective on youth, Juno hit a nerve with audiences across north America on its release last year. But fame has brought its downsides - not least because Page’s manic work schedule has meant she has had to give up her great love: football. Until she was 17, she played right wing for two “soccer” teams in her hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, but she has reluctantly come to accept that “my days of competitive soccer are over”.Renown has also meant the invasion of privacy that is part and parcel of being a celebrity. “Yeah, people following me down the street and at the airport and all that. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who are, you know, actually famous.” Like Jen, she adds. As in Jennifer Garner, Mrs Ben Affleck, who plays the potential adoptive mother of Juno’s baby, and who is, Page says, “totally down to earth”. She also has nothing but praise for her co-star, 19-year-old Michael Cera. Cera, readers harbouring age-inappropriate crushes may be interested to know, is “an incredibly sweet guy - honest, non-judgmental, and every good adjective I can think of”.Page genuinely seems to have no interest in playing the fame game, and when she is praising actors she admires - such as Kate Winslet - she often says they are in it “for the right reasons”. If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends. Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong). She would rather be out in the fresh air than drinking Cristal in a VIP room. “I love the outdoors. I like to go camping, to hike. I read, I play the guitar. I’m pretty low-key,” she says. Last year she went backpacking in eastern Europe (complete with maple leaf on her rucksack so as not to be mistaken for an American).There is no point asking her what she is going to wear to the Oscars, should the ceremony take place. She has zero interest in clothes. “I hate shopping to the extent that I don’t shop,” she says, adding that if she didn’t have people to pick out clothes for her to wear to events, she would be “totally lost”.Though she is worlds apart from the Lohans and Hiltons and the other Hollywood clotheshorses, Page is in no doubt that the pressure put on women in the media is unhealthy. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” she says. “It needs to stop because it’s nothing but hurtful for everyone involved.” She says she isn’t too bothered at the prospect of being photographed buying a pint of milk without having brushed her hair - “Oh, that’s just who I am, so they are always going to get that,” she says, while admitting that “of course” she sometimes feels the pressure.”People judge you left, right and centre, and you see people judging other people because they are a size four [an eight in the UK] and it is disgusting.” She has no time for gossip magazines. “They just make you feel like crap and make you go out and buy things to fill that void. They propel the consuming machine,” she says. “We all have our insecurities. I would like to say, ‘Oh, I don’t care what people say about me.’ And to a certain extent, I don’t, I reeeally don’t. But as a young person it’s like, come on. And it’s not like guys don’t get it at all, but women are sooooooo harshly judged.”Particularly, she believes, in the movie business. “I hate how box-office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don’t see a box-office failure blamed on men,” she says. Such as? “Like when The Golden Compass came out. Daniel Craig was in it, and Nicole Kidman was in it, and people were just ragging on Nicole Kidman the whole time.” She also bemoans the lack of meaty leading roles for women. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools, supporters for that,” she says. “I guess it’s because we live in a patriarchal society, where feminism is a dirty word.”Page, naturally, is happy to be described as a feminist, and is gobsmacked to have recently discovered that “40% of women in America or less” consider themselves feminists. “If it’s about equality for the sexes, then who wouldn’t be?” she asks. It is no surprise coming from the woman who, musing on how gender roles are imposed on children by society, says: “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?” Juno is released on February 8
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