‘Love Actually’ Star Reveals She Was Kidnapped and Threatened By a Taxi Driver in Terrifying Incident – National Enquirer

Joanna Page is opening up about a terrifying ordeal she experienced while filming in South Africa nearly two decades ago.

The Love Actually and Gavin & Stacey star, 48, recalled the incident during the latest episode of English comedian Russell Howard’s Five Brilliant Things podcast, released Wednesday, September 24. Page revealed she was held hostage by a taxi driver for around an hour and a half, during which he threatened to take her somewhere, force her to strip naked and pose for photos.

At the time, Page was filming the 2005 BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth, which also starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Sam Neill. She explained that shortly after arriving in South Africa, she grew restless at her hotel. Against production’s advice to always travel with a chaperone, Page insisted on venturing out alone.

“I said, ‘Can you just get me a taxi and just take me to a [mall] somewhere?’” she shared. “They said, ‘We really don’t think you should do this,’ and I said, ‘I want to do it.’”

While walking around the mall, Page noticed the atmosphere change in the late afternoon. “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 recalled.

After approaching a man in a car for help, Page quickly realized she was in danger. “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 remembered.

Page described feeling truly helpless throughout the ordeal. “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.’”

Thinking fast, the actress decided to keep the driver talking. “My plan was just 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,” Page explained. “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.”

Page said she immediately ran to hotel staff in tears, who told her she was “incredibly lucky” to escape unharmed and warned her never to go out alone again.

Shockingly, Page revealed that just weeks later, her costar Cumberbatch was also abducted and held for hours during the same production.