2007’s Juno remains a beloved entry in the world of coming-of-age movies, delighting generations of fans and winning an Academy Award in the process. As a new memoir from one of the film’s stars reveals, the movie also sparked a behind-the-scenes relationship. In Pageboy, a new memoir from Juno MacGuff actor Elliot Page, it is revealed that Page was involved in a sexual relationship with Olivia Thirlby, who played Juno’s best friend Leah in the film and who came out as bisexual in 2011. According to Page, the pair’s “chemistry was palpable” and he was “embarrassingly shy” around Thirlby, who he saw as “so much older, capable and centered.”
“I was taken aback the moment I saw Olivia Thirlby,” Page writes. “We stood in her hotel room. Billie Holliday played. She was about to start making lunch, when she looked directly at me and said point-blank, ‘I’m really attracted to you.’ ‘Uh, I’m really attracted to you, too.’ At that we started sucking face. It was on… we started having sex all the time: her hotel room, in our trailers at work, once in a tiny, private room in a restaurant. What were we thinking? We thought we were subtle. Being intimate with Olivia helped my shame dissipate. I didn’t see a glint of it in her eyes and I wanted that — done feeling wretched about who I am.”
Videos by ComicBook.com
“Ironically, playing a pregnant teenager was one of the first times I felt a modicum of autonomy on set,” Page added. “I was wearing a fake belly but not being hyperfeminized. For me, Juno was emblematic of what could be possible, a space beyond the binary.”
Elsewhere in the memoir, Page also reveals that he had a relationship with Fantastic Four and House of Cards star Kate Mara, which began while Page was filming 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.
“This was right after I’d come out as gay and it was a time of exploration and also heartbreak,” Page wrote. “I think my relationship, or whatever you want to call it with Kate, very much encapsulates a certain dynamic that I consistently found myself in, which was falling for people that — I think a lot of us do this — who aren’t fully available. And the sort of safety in that and the highs and the lows and the serotonin bump, and then it goes away.”
Pageboy is now available wherever books are sold.
