Elliot Page talks about finally feeling comfortable as an out...

Elliot Page talks about finally feeling comfortable as an out transgender man in his new Time magazine interview. Credit: Wynne Neilly for TIME

Academy and Emmy Award-nominee Elliot Page says that both personally and professionally, a weight has been lifted since he announced in December that he is transgender.

In his first major interview since then, in a cover story for Time magazine published Tuesday, the 34-year-old star of Netflix's "The Umbrella Academy" said: "No matter the challenges and difficult moments of this, nothing amounts to getting to feel how I feel now."

Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, "I felt like a boy," Page said. "I wanted to be a boy. I would ask my mom if I could be someday." When he was about 9, his parents allowed him to wear his hair short, an emblem of great personal meaning for him. Of having it cut short again recently, after decades of wearing it longer for feminine screen roles, he said tearfully, "I just could not have enjoyed it more."

A working actor from age 10, Page, who publicly came out as gay in 2014, said that with his December announcement, "What I was anticipating was a lot of support and love and a massive amount of hatred and transphobia," adding, "That's essentially what happened."

Page understood his high visibility would make him the kind of role model unavailable during his youth in the 1990s. "My privilege has allowed me to have resources to get through and to be where I am today," said the star of films including "Juno" (2007) and "Inception" (2010), and a member of the X-Men movie franchise, "and of course I want to use that privilege and platform to help in the ways I can."

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