After her breakthough role in Juno, Ellen Page unexpectedly found herself on the Hollywood A-list. But she still prefers smaller, tougher movies – and speaking her mind

The day before Ellen Page and I meet up in Los Angeles, Barack Obama's administration makes a long overdue announcement: it will finally allow Plan B, a morning-after pill, to be made available to girls and women without a prescription. This move is, the New York Times reports with some understatement, "fraught with political repercussions for Obama".

This will sound absurd to most people who live in Britain, where the morning-after pill has been available without a prescription for over a decade. But in America, where certain politicians have about as much understanding of the realities of women's biology and contraceptive needs as a dung beetle, the issue of how much control a woman is allowed to have over her own body remains anachronistically fraught.