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Jack and I were weird kids together. We invented a game called tree bouncing where we sat on a circular piece of wood while holding on to a long piece of rope that dangled from the massive tree in Jack’s yard and launch ourselves off the trunk. The challenge was to spin as much as we could before the bottoms of our feet reconnected with the oak, often leaving one of us slamming our back or side into the hard bark. No pain, no gain. We even had our own political party, the Pigeon Party—our manifesto was hard to pin down, but we’d wander the streets advocating for pigeon rights, interviewing any stray birds we found. They typically waddled away from our requests.

Jack was teased pretty severely. He was often hyper, very hyper, which definitely annoyed some people. One kid would shove Jack against the lockers and attempt to stuff him in, harassing him virtually every day. The same kid forced me into a garbage bin once. Classmates were vicious, stirring him up and making his temper explode. This only made them pick on him harder. I wanted to be there for him. He was there for me, too. We needed each other.

Jack’s father died when he was three and his stepfather was not the warmest man. And perhaps I am projecting, but his stepdad was noticeably kinder to his biological son. It filled me with fury, but what could I do? Jack was just a kid, isolated in grief, with no place to put it.

“You would be cool if you did not hang out with Jack,” a different friend said to me while we played tennis near his house on Tower Road. We’d been best friends in elementary school, but since junior high our friendship was slipping—he had entered the popular group, and I was not into the “cool stuff.” I was into making up bizarre games with Jack and filming myself reading random scripts that came out of the fax machine. I wanted to be around someone who didn’t put up a front. As much as was possible for me at the time, I was myself with Jack. I suppose my aversion to “coolness” and “popularity” related to the degree to which I was already masking myself, fully aware of it or not, and popularity is the ultimate mask. A mold too tight. I felt compressed enough.

But it was Jack who helped me land my first lead in a film when I was fourteen. I got the part based off a self-tape we made downtown. The sides sprawled out on the floor, Jack making me laugh as he played the different parts. Just us. I could disappear, leave the body for a moment, paradoxically allowing me to connect to my body more. This would happen when I went away to film. The clothes and hair were not always fun, but the joy I got to feel while acting, that permission to leave, I could breathe. I have so much to thank Jack for.

The film was called I Downloaded a Ghost and it was about a teenager who … you guessed it, downloads a ghost off the internet. Carlos Alazraqui, now one of the stars of Reno 911!, was the ghost. He was incredible at impressions. I would ask him to do them over and over, particularly Homer Simpson. He was hilarious and nice and patient with me; it isn’t always easy working with kids.

It filmed in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the farthest I’d ever been from home. The woman who played the bully, who was not a teenager but in her early twenties playing a teen, was beautiful and sincere and treated me kindly. My crush on her overwhelmed me, a vibration, the way light circled her. When I was back at school in Halifax, I’d fantasize about her waltzing into the classroom, I really believed she might. How self-involved was I? I did and did not fully understand that I was crushing. All I knew was I could not stop thinking about her, I missed her. Could she tell I had a crush? I’m not sure.

I ached when projects ended, not yet accustomed to the intense on-set bond being abruptly broken. Working fueled me—it forced me to be in the present, forced me to feel. Being away from school, as much as I was during those years, you would think my grades suffered, but they didn’t. The opportunity to learn one-on-one with a tutor, with all the implied focus and care, meant that my lack of confidence in the classroom did not extend to a trailer or an office in the soundstage with school books scattered about. We could just do the work.

After I Downloaded a Ghost, jobs kept coming, a noticeable build. Something is happening, this could happen, I thought. I wanted a space that would allow for some autonomy, that reflected reality in a way that school did not. I was addicted to the fresh start I got on every film set. Enthralled by possibility, I poured my whole self into that world—I was in a place where being a weird kid was good. I didn’t want to look back.

I was cast as the lead in a film called Ghost Cat, a family film whose premise is, again, what you may expect from the title. As Rotten Tomatoes aptly puts it: A spectral feline causes mischief after a man (Michael Ontkean) and his teenage daughter move into an old house. It was only my second time being the lead in a film, coincidentally both with the word “ghost” in the title.

It was on this set that I met Mark. I had just turned sixteen and he was fourteen and shorter than me at the time. Mark was the voice of the beloved aardvark Arthur for years, in what had been one of my favorite TV shows growing up, between that and having just seen his sensational performance in The Interrogation of Michael Crowe, I was thrilled to meet him. My character was the new kid in town, and he played the kind young neighbor I befriended.

The director, Don McBrearty, was wonderful to work with. He was kind and gave good notes. The story was in many ways about a girl dealing with profound grief and change, disconnected from her new surroundings and herself. I caught myself in the reflection of a framed photograph before action, the way my long hair shaped my face, my forehead gleaming. Who is that? A wave of nausea. ACTION. Disappear.

It was a couple months later in Montreal, where I was making my next project, a Lifetime movie called Going for Broke starring Delta Burke, that Mark and I properly became close. Where something clicked and eternally remains. We had stayed in touch and planned to get together in the city, he was there working on a film, too, but we hadn’t spoken yet.

I was flipping through a chord book and clumsily strumming my Art & Lutherie, an acoustic guitar that happened to be made in Quebec. Playing simple songs, I quietly sang. Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, the Beatles, even some of my own songs, when the hotel phone rang.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hi!” It was Mark.

He’d been out walking, and as he passed the hotel he just knew, Ellen is staying there. The automatic doors moved to the side as he made his way to the front desk and asked confidently, “Can I be connected to Ellen Page’s room, please.” And out of the many, many hotels in downtown Montreal, there I was. Mark describes it as some strange, strong intuition, he felt sure.

This was the first time Mark and I spent time together alone. With no other castmate or tutor or parent present, he opened up in a new way, a sadness slipped out. Always so sweet, thoughtful, patient, perfect really, he needed a break from that, he needed someone to say, “How are you doing?” And mean it. He was struggling. Isolated from peers. At home, at school, at work, feeling detached and empty and unclear why. Immense pressure to act, with little yield of pleasure. There was a crack and I watched it grow in front of me, a good one, necessary, the green forcing its way through the concrete.

Periodically he’d apologize for sharing so much, shame himself for his feelings. I wanted him to have space to express himself unfiltered, encouraging Mark to let go, to not censor with me or for me. I could sense the tension and wished he could relax, for the strained forehead to release.

Our time together in Montreal is marked for me by music. We listened to Radiohead endlessly, and Mark, a much better guitarist than me, helped with my rudimentary cover of “Fake Plastic Trees.” But this time was marked not just by Thom Yorke’s distinctive voice, but also by our deep level of connection, of honesty and recognition—these moments, shared by two kids, led to our lifelong friendship.

Mark is how I first learned about Interact, the academic program in Toronto that I would end up attending a year later. There, I suppose I played a similar role, creating a space where Mark could be fully himself and, in return, as much as possible, so could I. He’d been much more sheltered than me, with rather overprotective parents. He was always around them, at school, or at work. You see this with a lot of child actors, isolated but never alone.

Other than when I was a little kid with my mom, I’d barely used the subway in Toronto. At fifteen, I first navigated the TTC solo when traveling downtown from my aunt’s place in Etobicoke, where we visited that summer. Listening to Coldplay’s Parachutes on my yellow Sony portable CD player, I’d read through sides for whatever auditions I had on the docket that day. Between that and only a month of living in Toronto, I already knew my way around the city better than Mark. I think his parents resented me for helping orchestrate badly needed independence, room for Mark to decide what he actually wanted and yearned for.

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