Ready for the next step

Ellen Page has established herself as a serious young actor seemingly driven to provoke audiences in some of indie film’s darkest roles, performances that capitalize on her innocent, open expressions -- then pervert and mangle them.

She’s played a murderous adolescent who baits a pedophile in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival hit “Hard Candy,” a street urchin seduced by a nomadic cult in the Canadian release “Mouth to Mouth” and a mentally ill girl wandering the streets naked in this year’s “The Tracey Fragments.” In “An American Crime,” she literally starved herself to portray the real-life story of Sylvia Likens, the daughter of carnival workers who was tortured, starved, beaten and raped for no apparent reason in 1965 by an Indianapolis housewife and her kids.

Yet it’s Page’s role as the quirky, quick-witted pregnant teenager in the endearing new dramatic comedy “Juno” that’s expected to launch the 20-year-old indie film darling as a new mainstream star and Oscar contender. The film, opening Wednesday in L.A., has already earned accolades on the fall festival circuit and landed Page a lead spot on Fox Searchlight’s busy promotions calendar.

Even an otherwise escapist exercise -- in this case, a recent morning hike through the misty hills of Will Rogers State Historic Park -- carried a sense of urgency and executive planning. Page was chauffeured to the park in a sleek black sedan. A studio publicist trailed behind and a stylist awaited her in an SUV for touch-ups before a photo shoot.

None of this seemed native to her, though. The petite actress wore a girlish ponytail that kept time with the purposeful stride she cut in her colorful, bowling-themed high-top sneakers. She planted her hands deeply into the pockets of her windbreaker on which she wore a button that read “Nova Scotia: Canada’s Ocean Playground.” As she walked, she absent-mindedly smoothed her bangs against her face.

Page, who still lives in Nova Scotia, seemed to be observing the whole PR spectacle from a safe distance. She possessed an ethereal sense of calm, as if comfortable knowing that soon enough she’d return to her quiet life in Halifax. There, she doesn’t own a car. She walks everywhere. She goes camping and reads a lot. She recently returned from a monthlong trip backpacking in eastern Europe.

Back in L.A., she couldn’t help but be reminded of Christopher Guest’s Oscar campaign sendup, “For Your Consideration.” “It is so different [in Halifax] and then when I get thrust back into everything, it can all feel very bizarre,” she said, suddenly turning her gaze from the path to make eye contact. “But, I think that’s a good thing.”

As Juno MacGuff, Page plays an affable girl-next-door type, though Diablo Cody’s sharply written script gives the character a tart comic bite. In the film, Juno decides to give up her baby for adoption to a wealthy suburban couple (played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) with their own problems. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney play Juno’s unflappable father and stepmother. Michael Cera plays Juno’s baby’s daddy. But the film’s heart comes from Page’s ability to channel wit and youthful vulnerability without a trace of sentimentality.

For Page, “Juno” is a welcome break from the more challenging material, a chance to charm filmgoers rather than polarize them. (Next, Page costars with her “Juno” castmate Olivia Thirlby in another indie, “Jack and Diane,” as a young lesbian in love in New York.)

“I’m used to people hating the film or hating me,” she said. “That’s fine, because it’s nice just to get a reaction out of somebody. But it is nice to sit in a theater -- like when I first saw [“Juno”] with an audience in Toronto -- the whole time, people were just laughing. It was nice to feel that kind of warmth.”

Digging in deep

Page spoke quickly and earnestly. Acting is an enormously emotional process for her. She plumbs the depths, even lives the character. But she’s also a professional. She noted that one of her idols, Sissy Spacek, gave incredibly layered performances in “Carrie” and “Badlands,” but in real life remained “so grounded, super smart, separate.”

Compared with Page’s other roles, “Juno” feels like a cakewalk. But backstage wisdom dictates that comedy is tougher than the most trying dramatic roles.

“I was really nervous in general right before shooting this,” she said. “I always do this. I get really excited about shooting a film and then I get deathly -- like I’ve forgotten how to act. ‘This is just a mess! I’m going to screw up the best script of all time!’ Then there’s the whole comedy thing.”

She trailed off, took a quick glance at the mountain vistas and then picked up the thought. “The main thing I wanted was obviously to make it feel natural and fluid and not contrived and annoying,” she said. “You obviously can’t find the character annoying who is kind of taking you through this film.”

“Juno” director Jason Reitman cast Page after seeing her in “Hard Candy,” a performance he considered so transcendent that he likened it to Jodie Foster’s debut in “Taxi Driver.” “You saw a career opening up before your eyes,” he said.

He later told Page that no other actress was seriously considered for the role of Juno. “When I met her, it wasn’t even a second thought,” said Reitman. “It’s a combination of her fearlessness and her intellect. It was literally like meeting Juno. She comes right at you with her intelligence and her sense of humor.”

There’s a good bit of Page in the character, whom Cody based roughly on her own adolescent self -- the prickly intellect, the sharp independence. But Page brought a lot of her imagination to the part as well.

“I don’t like to get all analytical about it,” she said, smoothing her bangs. “It can isolate me from the genuine feelings . . . . I just fell in love with that character and I could feel it the second I read it. I felt like I needed to play that character. And after I can feel it here” -- she put her hand on her heart -- “it really just comes. I started to know how I wanted Juno to talk. And I realized she was this kinetic character and very abrupt. There’s something always moving.”

A performance is difficult to dissect, she added. “It comes from being connected to something. I don’t even know what it is.”

Page possesses the precocious self-awareness common in former child actors, but her presence lacks that aura of neurosis that often accompanies it. She credits Halifax with keeping her grounded.

Her mother’s a teacher and her father is a designer. She’s had no formal acting training. She lucked into the career track at 10, when a casting agent held auditions at her grade school for the Canadian TV movie “Pit Pony” and she landed a key role. The movie became a hit series and because it filmed near her home, she said, she was shielded from the unseemly side of life as a child actor.

In fact, she was in her mid-teens before she gave up competitive soccer to devote body and soul to acting. She was cast as a series regular on the Canadian TV show “Trailer Park Boys” and moved to Toronto alone at 16.

But her real break came when “Hard Candy” director David Slade chose Page to play a 14-year-old who avenges the murder of her friend by seducing, then emotionally torturing, a handsome stranger played by Patrick Wilson. In one wrenching scene, her character convinces Wilson’s that she has castrated him.

Though the film was seen mostly by film festival crowds, Page’s performance inspired critical raves. Seattle Weekly called it “an incandescent film arrival, like Cinderella on a rocket sled, packing heat pointed right in your face.” The Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert considered it “extraordinary acting.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman wrote that the scariest aspect of the film was “the fury of Page’s talent.”

It was a tough role to cast, Slade said. The characters had to understand the muddy moral ground of the story. Indeed, he said he auditioned nearly 300 girls for the part. Ultimately, Slade was struck by Page’s intelligence and emotional depth. On the set, he said, she was singly focused on her character.

“She often said, ‘I will cry. I will break down. I will look like I’m in a mess. That’s part of my process,’ ” Slade recalled. “When she’s in character, you can’t talk to her about anything else. When [in the film] she believes her friend was murdered, she believes it to the exclusion of the world. Yet, she’s not this impenetrable dark soul. She’s also this breath of fresh air.”

That performance landed Page a big studio film, playing Kitty Pryde in “X-Men: The Last Stand,” a blockbuster so far removed from the gritty indies that won her critical acclaim that some friends sniffed at the idea, mumbling about selling out. Page shrugged that off as pretentious. It was a lot of fun being a 5-foot-1 superhero, she said. And there were obvious career advantages. “Doing a film like that has helped me do the last five films I’ve shot,” she said.

From there, Page took on the toughest role of her career in “An American Crime,” based on a heartbreaking true story. Director Tommy O’Haver tried to shoot in chronological order, taking the cast on the excruciating journey of one teenager’s slow and tortuous death.

“At one point, while we were shooting, she was lying on the cellar floor, which is where a lot of it happened,” O’Haver recalled. “I noticed how skinny she was. I turned to her and I said, ‘Ellen, have you been eating?’ She said, ‘Well, no, because Sylvia wasn’t being fed.’ She said, ‘I’m doing this for you, Tommy.’ I just couldn’t believe it.”

Page has been on a breakneck press tour for weeks with no end in sight as “Juno” racks up accolades -- a standing ovation at the Toronto Film Festival in September and, last month, the top prize at the Rome film festival. For the young star, the movie earned a breakthrough award at the Hollywood Film Festival and last week a lead-actress nomination for the Spirit Awards.

Page is excited, but philosophical about the whole awards race. She said she doesn’t want to take herself too seriously.

“It’s funny,” she said with a sly half-smile. “I do what I do and obviously some people don’t like it and then there’s certain people that have responded well to different performances and it’s just -- it’s a weird thing. It’s something I can’t really describe. It’s something I feel like is already there, you know? It’s just about finding it and pulling it out. ‘Cause we all feel the same stuff.”

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gina.piccalo@latimes.com