Rise to Fame
A casting director stopped by a Halifax music class in 1997 looking for young actors. That accident led, eventually, to Juno, a $232 million indie hit that earned them an Oscar nomination and made the kind of famous that doesn't go away. The real signal came two years earlier in Hard Candy, a psychological thriller so unsettling that critics noticed even when audiences barely found it. Obscure Canadian TV to one role that proved range, then one that proved stardom.
In the Spotlight
The December 2020 coming-out post on Instagram got 3 million likes and made them the first openly trans man on a Time magazine cover three months later. Their 2023 memoir Pageboy hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Close to You (2024), the first film they made post-transition, was autobiographical enough that most of the dialogue was improvised. Christopher Nolan cast them in The Odyssey (2026), a $250 million IMAX production they've called more meaningful to do post-transition. The career isn't stalling.
Side Notes
One Toronto high school program counts both Page and Drake as alumni, which is a strange detail but an accurate one. They came out publicly as gay in 2014, six years before identifying as trans in 2020, and that gap is worth sitting with. Most public figures get one identity renegotiation. They did it twice, on the record, in real time. Their 2023 memoir treats Halifax as a character in its own right, drawing a line between the city's recovery from the 1917 explosion and their own. The analogy lands harder than it should.