Elliot Page says he got shingles during the filming of ‘Inception’
Ahead of the next massive undertaking from Christopher Nolan with the historical drama Oppenheimer, Elliot Page is sharing his experience and struggles when part of a Nolan production working on the film Inception back in 2008.
The film marked a bold vision for film, with a convoluted story featuring Page acting alongside actors like Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. Midway through the production, Page explained how he contracted shingles, telling Entertainment Weekly, “Shingles popped out of my spine while filming Inception when I was twenty-two”.
As Page struggled to figure out his gender identity, he went on to say that he didn’t understand the position that he was taking on, explaining, “In a cast full of cis men, I did not understand the role I found myself in”.
Since the production, Page came out as a trans man in 2020 after being assigned a female at birth. He has also been involved in the LGBTQ+ community, coming out as gay when speaking at the Human Rights Campaign conference.
Once production proceeded, Page would later recall that there was a joke about potentially recasting him, saying, “For the first two weeks of the film, I joked I would be recast with Keira Knightley, and rightfully so”. Page was playing the role of Ariadne, a college student who is put on a team assembled by DiCaprio’s Cobb to travel through dreams.
When talking about the health condition, Page believes that the shingles stemmed from his uncomfortable feelings about being on set, explaining, “Shingles communicated the stress my body felt, what my words could not”.
Since then, Page has been working on various other projects since then, becoming one of the main characters in Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy and working behind the camera on documentaries such as There’s Something in the Water and Into My Name.
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