OMG this is so scary!
If you’re in the UK, you probably know Joanna Page from the hit sitcom Gavin and Stacey. Over here, she’ll always be the adorable stand-in from Love Actually who told Martin Freeman, “All I want for Christmas is you.” Now we’ll never be able to look at the wholesome — or more risqué — parts of that story without thinking about this horror story!
Joanna was a guest on this week’s episode of Russell Howard‘s Five Brilliant Things podcast, and she told a harrowing tale of being abducted 20 years ago because she didn’t take the warnings about the area seriously enough!
Related: Keira Knightley Thought Love Actually Scene Was ‘Creepy’ At First!
The actress explained she had just joined the cast of a BBC miniseries called To The Ends Of The Earth with Benedict Cumberbatch. Upon arriving in South Africa, where they were filming, she was warned the area wasn’t safe:
“So I got to the hotel and they said, ‘You can’t go anywhere without your chaperone.’ And I thought ‘Oh, this is ridiculous, I’m really bored, I need to get out and about and do some stuff.’ I said, ‘Can you just get me a taxi and just take me to a [mall] somewhere?’ They said, ‘We really don’t think you should do this,’ and I said, ‘I want to do it.’”
She went to the mall and explored, all on her own — but around 4:30 in the afternoon, “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. I remember leaving the [mall] and there was a [parking lot] and loads of fellas in cars everywhere.”
She hired one of the cars to take her back to the hotel — or so she thought!
“So I got in the car and then he drove off and he drove me around for about an hour and [30 minutes] telling me that he was going to take me somewhere, I was going to take off all of my clothes and he was going to take photos of me.”
OH NO! It’s an actual nightmare for women on their own!
“And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God,’ you know most of the time you can find yourself in dodgy situations but you kind of think ‘Oh, I can get myself out of this quite easily.’ But it was the only situation I think 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. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’”
So… what did she do?? She decided to play along like she was having a good time, to “laugh with him, make him laugh, tell some jokes, be quite saucy back to him, if he’s saying he’s going to do this laugh back, be really, really cheeky.”
Ugh. Every woman has been in the position to have to do this, to varying degrees. But we guess it worked? Because he never took her to that second location:
“So I did that for about an hour and a half as he just drove me around and around and eventually he took me back to the hotel. I got out of the car, ran straight up into reception. I was just [in] such a state and I told them everything that had happened.”
The hotel staff told her she was “incredibly lucky” to have gotten back safe, warning her yet again, “Don’t ever do anything like that again.”
The craziest part? She says a couple weeks after that, Benedict Cumberbatch was abducted, too! And he was held for hours! Whoa!
The Marvel star has actually spoken about his own incident before, recounting to Variety earlier this year how he and a group of friends had a flat tire while out on a diving trip on a day off. A group of six men saw them stranded there, abducted them, robbed them, and finally tied them up — on their knees like they were about to be executed! Instead, the thieves just left. Scary stuff! Cumberbatch said the near-death experience changed him for a long time:
“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.”
Thankfully that calmed down once he settled down and had a family. But wow, that really does make Joanna’s story even scarier, knowing her fears were NOT exaggerated!
See her full interview (below)!
[Image via StudioCanal/YouTube.]
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