The ‘Juno’ questions have driven her batty
If Ellen Page is having trouble adjusting to being the latest “It girl,” she doesn’t show it.
As the star of “Juno,” the indie comedy that’s made more than $100 million and is up for four Academy Awards tonight – including Best Actress – Page, 20, has been riding a tsunami of publicity.
An hour before the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, she sat calmly in a giant brown booth in the bar of the Beverly Hilton hotel.
The picture of tomboy chic in a striped black-and-white dress and a black leather jacket, her hair and makeup are flawless, but her nails are bitten to the quick. She’s talking about bats.
“They’re really beautiful creatures. Like profoundly beautiful,” she says. “Vampire bats are so sweet, and they take in bat orphans. And they remember favors, and they repay favors.”
Page recalls backpacking in Belgrade and how taken she was by the sight of bats flying overhead.
“You know those moments,” she says. “You just feel so alive.”
Acting makes her feel the same way, Page says. She “fell into it” when she was 10 in her native Nova Scotia.
She already had more than a dozen film credits, including a starring turn in 2005’s “Hard Candy,” when she landed the role of Juno MacGuff.
Just don’t ask her to compare herself to her breakthrough character.
“Sorry,” she says. “The ‘How do you relate to Juno?’ question is really the bane of my existence.”
Page is something like Juno, an offbeat teen who must deal with an unexpected pregnancy.
Though she’s “not as comfortable in my skin” as her character, the quick-witted Page says she tried to make Juno “as honest as possible.”
“It was just making her a young woman that we haven’t seen before,” she says. “Having her be intelligent and articulate and all those things, but also having her be naive in moments and arrogant in moments.”
Her performance resonated with Oscar voters.
“It’s all very bizarre,” says Page. “To have your name involved with a group of women, a group of people who you just have so much respect for and so much admiration for, it actually feels kind of wrong.
“I feel young and I feel like I just have a lot more I want to discover … and just so much to learn.”
Page will next be seen in theaters April 11 alongside Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker in “Smart People,” as the politically conservative daughter of a widowed English professor.
Her next adventure will be a trip to Texas, where Page is set to star in “Whip It,” Drew Barrymore‘s directing debut, as a teenager forced to compete in beauty pageants who finds salvation when she joins a roller-derby team.
“There’s a lot of bats in Texas,” she says. “They have this famous bridge where all the bats come out, and it’s supposed to be really amazing.”
The birthday bunch
Actor Abe Vigoda is 87. Actor Dominic Chianese is 77. Actor James Farentino is 70. Actor Barry Bostwick is 63. Actor Edward James Olmos is 61. Actress Helen Shaver is 57. Newswoman Paula Zahn is 52. Country singer Sammy Kershaw is 50. Actress Bonnie Somerville is 34.