Elliot Page has spoken out about the moment he "collapsed" after he felt pressured to present himself in feminine clothing during the promotional tour of Inception.
In the latest edition of the Apple TV+ series The Oprah Conversation, 34-year-old Page recalled wearing "a dress and heels to pretty much every single event" while promoting the 2010 Christopher Nolan epic, Inception.
Page then speaks about a specific moment during the movie's premiere in Paris.
Prior to the event, Page says that his manager - who he assures is "like family" to the star - presented three dresses to the actor while in the hotel room.
Opening up to 67-year-old Winfrey, Page says: "And I just like, I lost it. I got so... it was like a cinematic moment. The kind of thing that would be in a movie."
The actor would eventually pick a black and grey asymmetric dress for the evening, but following the screening, the turmoil he was facing became too much for Page.
"And that night, after the premiere at the after-party, I collapsed. That was something that's happened frequently in my life, usually corresponding with a panic attack," he said, adding: "I’m sure the two correlate, and the whole period correlates.
"Ultimately, it's every experience you’ve had since you were a toddler, people saying, 'The way you’re sitting, that’s not ladylike, the way you’re walking, you’re walking like a boy, the music you’re listening to as a teenager, the way you dress' - every aspect of who you are being looked at and put in a box in a very binary system. That's what it leads to."
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Page revealed that the clothes he was made to wear for roles would make him feel "unwell", and the actor became emotional recalling a specific moment during the 2008 Academy Awards.
Nominated for Best Actress for his role in the teenage drama Juno, Page said: "It wasn't good. That was a pretty intense time.
"I remember it felt so impossible to communicate with people how unwell I was, because obviously there is so much excitement. The film unexpectedly became a big hit, I became quite known, your financial situation... all these things and I felt I couldn’t express the degree of pain I was in.
"The Oscars, for example, I could not look at a photo from that red carpet. People might watch this and be like, 'Oh my gosh, this person is crying about the night they went to the Oscars.'
"I think that again prevents the ability to allow yourself to not just feel the pain, to reflect on the pain, to even begin to sit down and start to bring it all up and finally confront all of that."
Page came out as a transgender man back in December, later revealing in an interview with Time Magazine that he has always "felt like a boy".
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