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Ellen Page grows up as an actress and producer with 'Freeheld'

Acting since childhood, the recently out actress tackles a very personal issue

The last time I interviewed Ellen Page at the Toronto International Film Festival was in 2009, for the roller-derby movie, "Whip It." She was 22, dressed in a hoodie, shy, uncomfortable.

In September of this year, approximately 18 months after she came out as a gay woman, Page is stylishly dressed up, confident, fangirling about Emily Blunt (who's doing interviews for "Sicario" at the same hotel) and speaking both as the star and producer of "Freeheld," a drama about the real-life domestic benefits case of New Jersey policewoman Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) and her partner Stacie Andree (Page).

The change in Page is quite striking, and when I ask her about it, she says, "I'm happy now."

Page came to "Freeheld" when she was 21, when fellow producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher brought her the story and showed her clips from the Oscar-winning 2007 short on Hester and Andree.

"I was shooting a movie at the time," Page said, "and I watched the trailer in my hotel room and I cried. I said 'yes' immediately to attach myself to play Stacie [Andree]."

Page said that Shamberg and Sher brought her into the development process and helped push her forward as a producer.

"I really like producing, and I feel grateful to 'Freeheld' and 'Into the Forest' [another 2015 film, in which Page stars with Evan Rachel Wood] to have learned so much. I've worked with people who've been really patient and generous. With 'Into the Forest' I was very honest about, 'Hey I don't know what it is to finance an independent movie. But I'd really love to learn about it if you wouldn't mind letting me tag along on these phone calls.'

"Producing is a lot of waiting, and it can be a lot of heartbreak," Page said. "You think something's coming together and then one little piece doesn't and that's it. But you have to wake up the next day and pull your boots up and go out on it again. There is even something nice about that feeling when you're in the process of making something you care about."

Additionally, producing gives Page opportunities to work when she's not acting.

"You can have a year where you shoot multiple movies and you're very busy and then you can have other years - partially your choice, partially not - and not be as busy. There is something nice about consistently being able to work on stories that I'm excited about telling."

Page - who's perhaps best known for roles as a pedophile-exposing teen in "Hard Candy," as the pregnant "Juno," as Kitty Pryde in the "X-Men" movies and as Ariadne in Christopher Nolan's "Inception" - said that even though she's been acting since she was 10, she still loves it.

"My job's always different. I'm with different people all the time, different scenarios, different cities and different countries. But at the same time I felt I needed a slightly different dimension to add to my life, to alter my experience a bit in relation to making movies."

Page said that one of her goals in developing "Freeheld" was to keep the story as true to real life as possible, and she believes the film accomplishes that.

"The only adjustments we made were for structure," she said. "For example, [Laurel's partner] Dane Wells was a cop in the past and came back to support her, but it's obviously much better to have Michael Shannon [who plays Wells] be her partner [in the present] so they have scenes together and we can establish their partnership.

"But I think it's as spot-on as you can get in trying to put a six-year experience into 103 minutes."

Tying the movie's story into the "amazing Supreme Court decision" in support of gay marriage, Page said, "Typically with progress, especially when it's in regards to civil rights, there's a backlash . . . which we're seeing. The marriage argument can become such a symbol and ideological conversation - and as a symbol and as something ideological it's super important . . . I am equal. I can get married. Falling in love with a woman is a huge part of who I am as a person, so if you devalue that love, you are devaluing who I am, and it's hurtful.

"But what I think the film does on top of that is that it makes it this deeply personal story and shows the real logistical and practical impacts of inequality.

"To be in a situation where you're a cop, you've spent your entire career protecting the citizens of New Jersey, you've gotten your domestic partnership, the law in New Jersey is that your domestic partner gets your benefits . . . but there's this one tiny loophole and five people are looking at you as you're dying and they're saying to you, 'No.' And they're saying to you 'no' because you are gay.

"It's that simple."