Ellen Page busy with ‘Flatliners,' among other new films

TORONTO

Half a lifetime ago, Ellen Page figured she had options if the acting thing didn’t go anywhere.

“When I was a teenager, I thought, ‘What if it doesn’t work out?’ I thought I was going to be a cinematographer,” said Page, whose career skyrocketed after her turn as a pregnant teenager in 2007’s “Juno.” “I was also obsessed with movie trailers. I was like, ‘I’ll make movie trailers.’”

“Juno” nabbed her an Oscar nomination at age 20, and now, almost exactly a decade later, Page is busier than ever.

This week, she stars in the slick studio remake of the 1990 thriller “Flatliners,” about a group of medical students toying with the boundary between life and death.

Earlier this month, she premiered two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival: the Irish zombie thriller “The Cured” and the romantic drama “My Days of Mercy,” about two women on opposite sides of the death-penalty debate who fall in love.

Soft-spoken, gracious and direct, Page reflected on the course life has charted since the early days, cracking the occasional mischievous smile.

“I’m getting old,” joked Page, one of the rare faces in Hollywood that never seems to age. “It’s interesting to look back. If I was to re-watch something like ‘Hard Candy’ now, I’d be like, ‘(Look at) all this feminist conversation!’ At the time, I was just 17.”

“Hard Candy,” the 2005 thriller directed by David Slade starring Page as a Red Riding Hood-esque teen turning the tables on a sexual predator, marked the first time audiences had an inkling that a deeper, darker maturity lived within her 5-foot-1-inch frame.

Roles in big films and acclaimed indies followed as Page’s star rose. But something crucial was lacking in her career, despite successes like “Juno,” “Whip It” and “Inception.”

“In that time and the years following, I wasn’t necessarily that connected publicly to who I was,” said Page, who came out as gay in 2014. Being able to live authentically in her public life, she said, unmistakably affected the roles and projects she took on in her professional life.

“I think the biggest difference is feeling more able to be present in this, more able to enjoy, to feel at ease,” she said. “Exploring how that changes how you work, how it can deepen the work. I think now I do feel a little more solid, and more able to be present in this.”

Page was intrigued by “The Cure,” an intensely emotional family drama in the guise of an apocalyptic zombie flick. She took on the role of Abbie, a journalist and mother to a young son wrestling with grief and forgiveness in a gritty contemporary Ireland where individuals rehabilitated after an outbreak of violent psychosis are reintroduced to society as pariahs.

“It moved me. It provoked thought and conversation,” Page said of the David Freyne-directed film. “The Cured” was filmed just after the presidential election last fall, and real world anxieties became unintentionally prescient in the movie’s apocalyptic realism.

Page stars in and produced the romantic drama “My Days of Mercy.” In it, she plays a withdrawn anti-death penalty activist who enters a star-crossed romance with a woman on the other side of the political debate.

As wildly divergent as Page’s two latest indies are, both “The Cured” and “My Days of Mercy” have a common thread in her sensitive portrayals, characters processing grief, trauma and loss, fighting to reclaim their optimism in the face of the impossibly bleak worlds they live in. Perhaps surprisingly, Page sees her “Flatliners” character as occupying a similar emotional space.

“She’s had some trauma in her life, which I don’t think is a shock for a ‘Flatliners’ movie,” said Page, who plays the ringleader of a group of med students experimenting with death in pursuit of answers beyond science. “I focused on this person being incredibly traumatized and pretty disassociated. She’s kind of manipulative. I liked exploring what it would mean to convince people to do this and what would it take.”