Elliot Page found the prospect of working without a script on Close to You “terrifying”.

In the drama, the Juno actor plays a trans man who returns home to a small town in Canada to see his family for the first time since transitioning.

Page admitted to Variety that he was nervous about shooting Dominic Savage’s film without a script in the run-up to production.

“The leading up to it was terrifying,” he shared. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, what have I done, I’m just going to disappoint, I don’t know how to improvise.'”

Thankfully for Page, the improvisation came naturally to him once he began filming.

“It really was actually remarkable and I have no other way to describe it other than it did just happen,” The Umbrella Academy star continued. “And the next thing you knew, you were disappearing into another space and it could be like, ‘Cut!’ and you’d have no concept of the fact that you’d just done a 26-minute take. I think our longest was 53 minutes.”

The 37-year-old also reflected on the differences between traditional filmmaking and Savage’s improvised sets.

“For me, that magical joy, that special sensation of acting, this indescribable sensation of emotionally transcending somewhere else, while also being extremely present… this lets you fully disappear into that. And you get to stay there,” Page said. “It’s not two minutes and then cut and then we’re going to wait half an hour for the camera to be turned.”

Close To You marks Page’s first film since 2017 and the first since he came out as a trans man in December 2020. It recently screened at London’s BFI Flare film festival.

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