![]() As an adult, Viktor is a shaky, taciturn figure, a mediocre violinist and the author of a tell-all memoir meant to expose the merciless family dynamic of the famous Umbrella Academy, but the book, like his other endeavors, is unsuccessful. ![]() We see Viktor’s desolate childhood in flashbacks: Sir Reginald excluded him from Umbrella Academy missions because of his supposed lack of powers, and constantly reminded him that, though his siblings were special, he was ordinary. Page’s character (Number Seven), who begins the series with the name Vanya and, in the new season, changes it to Viktor, bears the worst of Sir Reginald’s tendency to reward acquiescence and punish any power that may threaten his own. Sir Reginald prepares the children for his grand plans by subjecting them to gruelling and often abusive training. The kids’ maternal figure, Grace, a robot of uncertain sentience (quite literally a wire mother) that Sir Reginald designed to care for them in the style of a chipper nineteen-fifties housewife, eventually gives them more humanizing names, and they call her Mom. Instead of giving the children real names, he refers to them by numbers he has assigned them-one through seven-which hint at a mysterious hierarchy. As we learn in a series of backstories that unfold in the course of the show, Sir Reginald is a preternaturally bad dad, a monstrous caricature of the sort of self-serving parent who sees his children as vessels for ambition and success. “The Umbrella Academy” is not about heroes, though, but about how the savior fantasy can go awry. Sir Reginald hones their skills, molding them into a unit of child crime fighters known as the Umbrella Academy. The family’s patriarch, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, is an eccentric billionaire who tries to collect as many of the forty-three spontaneously birthed babies as he can, and winds up with seven of them, all of whom possess superpowers. The show follows a group of adopted siblings, the Hargreeves, all spawned on the same day-October 1, 1989-by women who were not previously pregnant and who experience, in the first moments of the series, the rapid swelling of their stomachs and the immediate births as a shocking, supernatural horror. Based on a series of comics by Gerard Way, the androgynous frontman of the emo-rock band My Chemical Romance, “The Umbrella Academy” is campy and darkly funny, full of misguided, endearingly ignoble antiheroes who are constantly struggling toward some semblance of self-actualization. It did, at least, seem like the kind of fictional world that could accommodate a trans character. When I heard that his character on “The Umbrella Academy” would be transitioning, I was curious, if a little anxious, about how the show would pull it off. I had recently started taking testosterone, and I watched-with some relief not to be in such a glaring spotlight myself-as each new selfie Page posted on Instagram was met with waves of both support and scrutiny. My dad used to tell me that I resembled Page, and it seemed clear, all of a sudden, why that was. The caption read, “Meet Viktor Hargreeves.”Īs a person roughly Page’s age who came out as transmasculine past the age of thirty, and who grew up identifying with the quirky girls he was renowned for playing, I met the news of his transition with glee and a certain recognition. Netflix confirmed, after Page’s announcement, that he would remain in the cast, but little other information was given about his character’s trajectory until March of this year, when Page posted an image on Instagram of his character, who had been introduced as a woman, looking very much like a man. ![]() He had been a serious actor since his youth, when he garnered acclaim for his performance as a teen vigilante in the 2005 pedophilia-revenge film “Hard Candy.” In 2008, Page was nominated for an Oscar for his titular role in the indie comedy “ Juno,” and was launched, at age twenty, to a new tier of celebrity that would lead to work in big-budget movies such as Christopher Nolan’s “ Inception.” Before he made his transition public, the latest turn in his career had been a leading part in “The Umbrella Academy,” a superhero series that became one of Netflix’s most popular original shows. When Elliot Page came out as transgender, in December of 2020, he was immediately thrust into the harrowing position of being one of the most famous trans people in the world.
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