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LOS ANGELES -- Blink, and you'll miss Ellen Page.
She's a wisp of a woman, a 19-year-old who slouches when she walks, speaks in a near whisper and hides her petite frame under layers of loose, casual clothes: a flannel shirt, T-shirt, jeans.
She's the bookish girl you vaguely remember from high school.
Until you turn the camera on.
Then, directors will tell you, she can become a 5-foot-tall seductress, predator, even superhero.
Which may explain how the relative unknown from Nova Scotia has landed two high-profile roles: as the teen target of an Internet predator in Hard Candy, out Friday, and as Kitty Pryde in X-Men: The Last Stand, due May 26.
"She's the most chameleon-like actress I've ever met," says X-Men director Brett Ratner. "She's a shy person, until she wants to become something else."
And becoming something else is Page's forte. Her 14-year-old character, Hayley Stark, isn't as vulnerable as she initially appears in Candy; in X-Men, her Kitty Pryde is a mutant who disappears by passing through walls.
Page, too, seems to enjoy vanishing.
"The thing I like about acting is being able to lose yourself completely in someone else," she says over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel. "I'm not that comfortable when I get recognized."
She may have to deal with recognition after Candy, however. The unsettling film about pedophilia rests squarely on the shoulders of Page and co-star Patrick Wilson.
The film blurs the line between villainy and heroism, and its dark themes virtually assure that the R-rated movie won't be a box-office smash.
But it already has the attention of some powerful Hollywood types, including Ratner.
Ratner saw an early cut of Candy and immediately offered a part to Page. Without reading the script, Page, who had done only a few films and TV shows in Canada, turned it down.
"Most actresses would have killed just to be an extra," Ratner says. "I had to beg her to read the script first."
After reading the screenplay, Page accepted, hesitantly. "I don't really want to do the Hollywood thing," she says. "I think you ought to try to say something with your movies."
Which may ensure her success, says Candy producer Richard Hutton, who picked her from a pool of 300 actresses.
"She reminds me of a younger Hilary Swank," Hutton says. "Yeah, she has extraordinary range. But it's more the brightness she has that comes through on screen. She is a smart woman, and her characters are, too."
"Smart" isn't the only adjective Page has heard since Candy.
After a festival screening in Palm Springs, Calif., a woman came up to the actress and accused her of being "sadistic," Page says.
"I love hearing that," says Page, who was 17 when she did Candy. "I don't care if people like my character. I just want them to think about the movie's message."
Suddenly, Page is animated. When the subject of Candy comes up, the actress loses her shyness.
"This movie has a lot to say about sexuality, about the objectification of women," she says.
She is interrupted briefly when Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, passes her table, glancing at the waif raising her voice.
Page smiles.
"When I feel strongly about something," she says, "I'm not so quiet."
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