Fading into an imaginary world

A quick glance at these experiences - exhausting journeys of uncovering the dark emotions of her characters - and you're surprised she hasn't taken away even more. Sparked from when she played Joanie in Marion Bridge, when she first experienced a feeling of transition through the body and the mind whilst acting, Page lets herself be utterly exposed in her roles.

"It's the feeling of letting go but being insanely honest at the same time because you're just, almost being transparent and fading into this imaginary world that I guess is in your mind," she says.

For Page, of all the imaginary worlds she's faded into, assuming the role of Sylvia Likens in Tommy O'Haver's An American Crime was the hardest. The film, currently in the post-production stages, is based on the true story of a teenage girl who was locked in a basement and tortured to death in Indiana in 1965. The film took a toll on Page both mentally and physically, she says, and as she portrayed the 16-year-old girl who underwent inconceivable pain, she didn't have the comfort of a fictitious character to fall back on.

"To go to a place of just so much pain and so much fear and so much, just, dehumanization, and not being able to combat that with, 'Oh this is just a screenplay that someone has conjured up,'" she says. "The fact that this girl is now inside of you and you're going through what someone actually went through, and it's just truly, truly unimaginable."

But that sort of feeling is what Page relishes in. When working with a script that she describes as "really real," it doesn't matter how outlandish, extreme or dark it is, because if it's honest, she'll connect with it. And as she lets herself go and dives into the difficult characters she chooses to portray, she observes how the experience is affecting her and learns from it.

"It's like, this is sick because this is kind of why I do it, because you get to do all this crazy shit," she says. "I just adore being able to go into the darkest parts of yourself and have the justification to bring it out, which our society really doesn't often allow us to do, to connect to really ridiculous emotion.

"And I get paid to do that. I get paid to visit pain in my body." Read more>>

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