TV star Joanna Page opened up about a scary kidnapping ordeal.
The actress and This Morning miniseries presenter, who recently opened up about her marriage, shared a distressing incident she experienced while filming a BBC miniseries in South Africa.
Speaking on Russell Howard’s Five Billion Things podcast, Joanna explained: “When I first arrived to film, some of the cast were there before me. 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.'”
So, she decided to call a taxi to go to the nearby mall.
Joanna Page’s kidnap ordeal
“I went to a shopping centre, walked around for the whole of the day, and then it must have got to about [4:30] in the afternoon,” she said. “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.”
Believing she spotted a taxi driver, the Gavin and Stacey star asked him to take her back to the hotel — but it was here that Joanna Page’s kidnap ordeal started to take a turn.
“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 [bleep]. This is serious. You can’t get yourself out of this.'”
She came up with a plan
But then, Joanna came up with a plan.
“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.’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.”
Upon arrival at the hotel, the actress was told how lucky she was — and got a strong telling off.
“They said, ‘Oh my god, you’re so incredibly lucky. You’re just really lucky,'” she said, before adding that they told her: “Don’t ever, ever do anything like that again.”
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