“Being in the closet hurt my career way more than coming out,” Ellen Page said during her keynote address at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas on Saturday.

The Oscar-nominated actor, who came out in 2014 during a speech at a Las Vegas conference for counselors of young LGBT people, was on hand to discuss her new TV show Gaycation, alongside co-creator Ian Daniel. In the series, the pair travel the world to shed a light on the struggles of LGBT communities face abroad.

Since publicly disclosing her sexuality, Page has made a concerted effort to reflect her fight for LGBTQ rights in her work: on top of producing in and starring in Gaycation, she performed the same role on last year’s drama Freeheld, which told the true story of a woman who fought to have her pension benefit left to her female domestic partner.

Asked whether coming out has affected the roles offered to her, Page said she’s chosen not to focus on it, and stressed instead how fulfilled she feels by “being able to infuse my authentic self with my creative interests”.

“I feel so in love with what I do again,” she continued. “And I feel so grateful for that.”

“We can’t just be telling stories about one group of people,” Page added. “People need to have opportunity, and that’s what’s going to make the whole industry grow and blossom. It’s just something I’ve been reflecting on as to, ‘Oh, what if I hadn’t come out?’”



Page shared that Gaycation was born out of a desire to increase LGBT visibility in the media. She cited a pivotal moment in her life when she came across a lesbian comedy, But I’m a Cheerleader, on TV while growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “When Natasha Lyonne’s like, ‘I don’t get it,’ about French kissing that guy, I was like, ‘Neither do I!’ And that meant something to me,” Page said.

“There can be such loneliness and isolation when you’re living in a society that has this view of you’re different, or something’s wrong, or you’re sinful.”

Page acknowledged that unlike many of the LGBT people featured in Gaycation, she leads a “privileged” life, being able to live as an openly gay person in Los Angeles. “I have done a job that has given me money, and I can walk down the street and kiss my girlfriend.”

She added that she thinks often of “those who are much more vulnerable than me all around the world and in the United States.

“And here’s an opportunity to go make something that allows voices to be heard that you sometimes never hear, and hopefully reflect struggles that a lot of people go through and I think a lot of people simply don’t know about.”