Joanna Page is recalling a scary incident.
The Love Actually star detailed the traumatic ordeal she experienced in South Africa 20 years ago, shorty after arriving in the country to film the 2005 BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth, which also starred Benedict Cumberbatch.
“When I first arrived to film, some of the cast were there before me,” she said on the Sept. 24 episode of Russell Howard’s Five Brilliant Things podcast. “So I got to the hotel and they said, ‘You can’t go anywhere without your chaperone.’ And I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m really bored, I need to get out and about and do some stuff.’”
Despite the warning, Joanna, 48, insisted that the staff call her a taxi to take her to a local mall, where things eventually took a turn.
“I went to a shopping center, walked around for the whole of the day, and then it must have got to about [4:30] in the afternoon,” she continued. “The whole atmosphere just changed. It just started feeling really menacing. I had no way of getting back to the hotel, I didn’t have a car, I didn’t really know where I was going.”
In her desperation, the Gavin & Stacy actress approached a man who appeared to be a taxi driver and asked him to take her back to her hotel, but she said his demeanor quickly changed once they took off.
“He drove me around for about an hour and a half telling me that he was going to take me somewhere, I was going to take off all of my clothes and he was gonna take photos of me,” she explained. “Most of the time, you can find yourself in dodgy situations but you think, ‘I can get myself out of this quite easily.’ But it was the only situation I’ve ever been in in my life where I thought, ‘You’re in the s–t. This is serious. You can’t get yourself out of this.’”
Fortunately, Joanna did manage to come up with a plan on the spot.
“I thought, ‘Just laugh. Just laugh with him. Make him laugh. Tell some jokes. Be quite saucy back to him if he’s saying he’s gonna do this, laugh back and be really, really cheeky,’” she shared. “So I did that for about an hour and a half as he just drove me around and around and then eventually he took me back to the hotel.”
And upon her return, Joanna recounted her experience to the staff, who gave her a stern warning for the rest of her stay.
“They said, ‘Oh my god, you’re so incredibly lucky. You’re just really lucky,’” she said, adding that the receptionists told her, “Don’t ever, ever do anything like that again.”
Still, a similar situation did transpire during the same shoot when Benedict, 49, was also held hostage after going on a diving excursion with friends. When the group, accoridng to Variety, pulled over after their tire blew out on the drive back, they were robbed and abducted by six men before eventually being left tied up.
“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” Benedict told the outlet in January. “It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience.”
But the Doctor Strange star—who shares kids Christopher, 10, Hal, 8, and Finn, 6, with wife Sophie Hunter—noted that his refreshed outlook on life shifted once again after he became a father.
“It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment.’ I was throwing myself out of planes, taking all sorts of risks,” he went on. “But apart from my parents, I didn’t have any real dependents at that point. Now that’s changed, and that sobers you.”
