Actress Joanna Page revealed a scary situation in which she was held hostage by a taxi driver and was ordered to strip naked so he could take photos of her.
Page, 48, recently explained that the experience took place 20 years ago when she was filming the BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth in South Africa.
“When I first arrived to film, some of the cast were there before me because [I play] a character who comes into it later,” Page, who played Marion Chumley on the show, said while appearing on the Wednesday, September 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 ‘Oh, this is ridiculous, I’m really bored, I need to get out and about and do some stuff.’”
She then recalled asking if she could get a taxi and go to a mall. “They said, ‘We really don’t think you should do this,’ and I said, ‘I want to do it,’” Page said.
Once she arrived at the mall, she noted that the “atmosphere just changed” after she spent the afternoon there.
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“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,” she continued. “I remember leaving the [mall] and there was a [parking lot] and loads of fellas in cars everywhere.”
Page resorted to asking one of the men in the cars to take her back to the hotel, noting she would have been “stuck” otherwise.
“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,” she said.
Page continued, “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.”
She went on to say that the experience in the car “was the only situation” she ever 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.”
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In an attempt to get out of the situation, Page said she would “laugh with him, make him laugh, tell some jokes, be quite saucy back to him.”
“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,” the Love Actually actress said. “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.”
Page admitted she was “incredibly lucky” to have survived the experience, adding that she would never “do anything like that again.”
However, Page revealed she wasn’t the only person involved with the miniseries who was held hostage by a cab driver. She shared during the podcast that costar Benedict Cumberbatch was also abducted and held for hours during their time in South Africa.
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