When The Umbrella Academy returns to Netflix for its third season this summer, a familiar face will boast a new name.
Actor Elliot Page announced on social media last week that his character, who went by Vanya for the show’s first two seasons, will now be named Viktor, reflecting Page’s own coming out as trans.
It’s unclear what the exact circumstances of how Viktor comes to be—this is, after all, a show that loves an alternate dimension or timeline—but the widespread interpretation by the media of Page’s post is that his character is transgender. And subsequent lack of corrections from Netflix or the Umbrella Academy creators, certainly suggests that’s the case.
Based on a comic series of the same name written by My Chemical Romance lead singer Gerard Way, The Umbrella Academy follows a super-powered family of siblings through time travel and multi-dimensional capers. Its first two seasons were smash hits for Netflix—according to data from the streamer, the show’s second season was streamed by over 43 million viewers in its first 28 days.
Page portrays a shy, but gifted violinist with sound-focused powers, also known as Number 7 and the White Violin. The comic version of the character is not canonically trans, and wasn’t portrayed as such in the show’s first two seasons.
Page came out as a trans man in December 2020, about six months after the series’ second season released on Netflix and prior to the filming of Season 3. Credits on both the first and second seasons were updated to reflect Page’s new name, but until recently it was unclear how the writing of his character in the show would reflect his transition. At the time of Page’s coming out, there were reportedly no plans to change the character’s gender.
In March 2021 during filming, Page confirmed that he was back on set, and in Time Magazine’s profile of Page, showrunner Steve Blackman said there was “a tremendous weight off [Page’s] shoulders, a feeling of comfort.”
Whatever the details of how Viktor comes to be, the choice to rework an existing character to reflect an actor’s real-life transition has little precedent in Hollywood, particularly for an A-List star like Page.
Trans actors telling trans stories
Page is far from the first actor to transition mid-career. But he is definitely the highest profile actor to publicly transition while starring in an ongoing popular series with a bustling online fandom.
Thankfully, the film industry moving away from the era of prestige cisgender actors taking on trans roles. In just a few years since films and TV shows like The Danish Girl, Dallas Buyer’s Club and Transparent were winning Academy Awards and Emmys, those shows have since become textbook examples of why trans actors should tell trans stories. And the increasing visibility of actors like Page, Laverne Cox and others means more and more trans stories are getting told well in mainstream pop culture.
Cox’s breakout role was Sophia Bursett on Orange Is The New Black, and in 2017 she became the first trans person to play a trans role on network TV in the legal series Doubt. Leo Sheng has garnered critical acclaim for his portrayal of Micah Lee on The L Word: Generation Q (particularly considering the original series’ complicated relationship to trans folks). And Brian Michael Smith has played canonically trans roles on Queen Sugar and 9-1-1: Lonestar, among others.
All of these are characters written as trans and portrayed by trans people. More recently, productions are exploring new territory when it comes to who can play who on screen.
Veteran trans actors like Cox, Lee and Smith have portrayed minor and background characters who are neither trans or cis for years. But more recently Cox’s headline turn in Netflix’s Inventing Anna flipped the script. Cox portrayed Kacy Duke—a very real person who happens to be cis. And Jamie Clayton’s Gen Q character Tess is explicitly not trans.
Last year, rising comic superstar Patti Harrison, who is trans, starred in Together, Together as a cis woman who serves as a surrogate for a single man. Harrison earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her performance, and fielded a churning media cycle talking about her groundbreaking casting. In most interviews however, she acknowledged that it shouldn’t be the most interesting part of the film.
“I’ll talk about it now,” she told IndieWire at the time. “I want to get it out of the way, just get it out of the way. And then, I think there’ll be a time to put a pin in it.”
That’s all to say, trans actors are showing they can and should be considered for any role—whether a trans character or a cis character.
Still, there is baggage in asking a trans actor to step into the shoes of their gender assigned at birth. When Orange Is the New Black’s script called for scenes showing a pre-transition Sophia, creator Jenji Kohan originally approached Cox with plans to cast the role from outside. Cox volunteered to do it herself, but reportedly didn’t look “masculine enough.”
“I did my best to butch it up, and it wasn’t butch enough, apparently,” Cox said in a 2013 interview. Cox’s twin brother, musician M.Lamar, was ultimately cast in the role.
An example for the future
Despite these steps in who trans folks get to play on screen, there have still been few situations like Page’s in The Umbrella Academy. Something similar played out on Good Girls, where child actor Isaiah Stannard was cast to play a female character, but he came out as trans early in production and the show rewrote his character as a trans boy.
It’s unclear who directed the shift from Vanya to Viktor for Page, especially considering reports following Page’s coming out that the character would continue as written on the show. Perhaps producers and writers figured that asking Page, particularly fresh into his public transition and the wave of public scrutiny that came with it, to step backwards into feminine presentation to maintain continuity would be too much of an ask.
The environment of the show certainly seems conducive. Gerard Way, who authored the comics on which the series is based and remains an executive producer of the show, has been open about his gender journey, saying he uses both he and they pronouns.
“I never really subscribed to the archetype masculinity growing up, I had no interest in sports or anything like that. There was a time where I was called a girl so often that when I discovered the idea of transgenderism I considered myself to be more of a girl. So I identify with trans people and women a lot because I was a girl to a lot of people growing up,” they said in a 2015 interview.
Whatever the source of the choice, the decision to mirror Page’s transition through his fictional counterpart sets a precedent for other trans actors. It’s an example of someone not only getting to continue their starring role after coming out, but continuing it in a way that represents who they truly are—and that’s something special. Hopefully, Page’s experience will inspire other actors to come out without fear of risking their career or starring roles. And, hopefully, productions will be as open and willing to adapt as The Umbrella Academy has seemingly been.
We have to wait until the June 22 release of Season 3 to meet Viktor Hargreeves, but Elliot Page has already made his mark in more ways than one.
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