Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and Ellen Page in Juno Doane Gregory/Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Jason Bateman on Mark Loring: He is a little bit more narcissistic than I guess the ideal father profile would be. He wants to continue sowing his oats or chasing his dreams that are probably very outdated or unrealistic. I don't know how really genuine that desire is… It is more about not wanting to burden himself with another responsibility at a time when he is just not happy enough to give to that. And maybe I am just projecting. I love my daughter, and I know that there are times when one needs to dig a little bit deeper to not get impatient when they are screaming or not sleeping. You have to have a bit of a surplus of happiness and contentment to be able to give over to the extra areas. This guy didn't have that. I don't think he has got enough to keep his own happiness going.

J.K. Simmons on Mac: One of the things that I love about Mac is that he is this sort of Midwestern blue-collar Dad-guy. And we think: 'Oh we know him.' We know that guy. But then the way he says something, the cleverness of his sense of humor that we see so much in Juno, sort of reveals itself once in a while. Dad's got something going on upstairs besides heating and air-conditioning.

ON THE POLITICS OF PREGNANCY

"Can't we just kick it old school? I could just put the baby in a basket and send it your way. You know, like Moses in the reeds." — Juno MacGuff

Ellen Page, Olivia Thirlby, and Allison Janney in Juno Doane Gregory/Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Ellen Page: It is tackling this issue that we often treat as this really heavy, dark event. We look at it in a different perspective. [Juno] is extremely independent. She goes and finds adoptive parents before she even tells her parents that she is pregnant. I think it is nice to not always dwell on darkness… It can often be a lot easier to play a role where you are on a basement floor being beaten or something. It can often oddly be much easier to get to that place than to just establish comfort in the moment and try and be as genuine and honest as possible.

Olivia Thirlby: I don't think that the movie really takes a stance on whether teenage pregnancy is a good thing or a bad thing. Even though the movie is about the pregnancy and the quirkiness of that, it kind of could have been a different sort of unusual event. It is not a movie making a commentary about teen pregnancy. It is not pro-choice or pro-life. Juno obviously doesn't have an issue with having an abortion, but she decides that it is just not what she wants to do in that moment.

Ellen Page: It is not a political film. People jump to that conclusion because she doesn't have an abortion… [But] I [personally] don't think that middle-aged, rich, white men should be able to decide what goes on in a woman's uterus.