Actor Elliot Page isn’t holding back with his new memoir Pageboy, explaining in great detail about his experiences with different projects while on the rise in Hollywood. That includes a role in Christopher Nolan’s hit film Inception, which was released back in 2010. Per Insider, Page recalls in Pageboy that this was not a particularly fun set for him to be on. The young actor broke out in shingles while filming, and in addition to the physical discomfort, Page also says he felt like a fish out of water on the set.
“Shingles popped out of my spine while filming ‘Inception’ when I was 22,” Page writes in his memoir. “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.”
The Umbrella Academy star added, “For the first two weeks of the film I joked I would be recast with Keira Knightley, and rightfully so.”
Inception is about a thief who steals from his targets by extracting information from their dreams, tasked with implanting one person’s idea into the mind of another for his own chance at redemption. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the lead role while Page plays Ariadne, a grad student hired to construct dreamscapes. The film’s starring cast also includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, and Tom Berenger, though Marion Cotillard and Talulah Riley were also featured in memorable roles.
Elliot Page Felt Out of Place at the Time
Page came out as gay in 2014. He later announced in 2020 that he is a trans man and has changed his name to Elliot. All of that information getting publicly disclosed was still years away while Page was filming Inception, and he recalls how stressful it was to keep everything a secret at the time. High stress is believed to increase the risk of shingles, and that may have been a big part of why that happened to Page on the Inception set.
“I was not settled, I still felt out of place, stirring up the dust,” Page writes. “A pinball of projection, I internalized the chaos. It left me feeling bereft of hope.”
The actor added, “My body hoarded the unexamined emotions, sensations, wants, and needs. Easy sentences prepared in my brain, stuck. They were visible to me, written out, I heard the voice but my mouth refused to cooperate. Just the tick tick tick of the windup toy, or nothing at all.”
Pageboy is now available in bookstores. For more from Page on-screen, the actor will return in the upcoming fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. Page also voices a main role in the upcoming animated series Ark: The Animated Series, based on the video game Ark: Survival Evolved. The star-studded cast also includes Vin Diesel, Madeleine Madden, Gerard Butler, Russell Crowe, Jeffrey Wright, and Karl Urban.
