Love Actually Star Joanna Page Reveals She Was Held Hostage by a Taxi Driver and Told to Strip Naked for Photos By Becca Longmire

Actress Joanna Page is speaking out about a terrifying experience she endured while filming in South Africa 20 years ago.

While appearing on the latest episode of English comedian Russell Howard’s Five Brilliant Things podcast released on Wednesday, Sept. 24, Page, 48, said she was held hostage by a taxi driver who wouldn’t drive her back to her hotel for around an hour and 30 minutes.

Page — who has starred in movies including Love Actually and Dolittle, as well as TV shows such as Gavin & Stacey — said she’d been in South Africa filming the BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth, which aired in 2005. She starred in the drama alongside actors including Benedict Cumberbatch and Sam Neill.

“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 in the TV mini series, said.

She recalled, “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?'” Page shared, adding, “They said, ‘We really don’t think you should do this,’ and I said, ‘I want to do it.'”

Page noted, “So I went to a [mall], walked around for the whole of the day, and it must have got to about 4:30 in the afternoon, and 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,” she continued. “I remember leaving the [mall] and there was a [parking lot] and loads of fellas in cars everywhere.”

Page ended up going up to one of the men in the cars and asking him if he’d take her back to her hotel, realizing that otherwise she’d just be “stuck” there.

“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 remembered.

“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,” Page said. “But it was the only situation I think I’ve ever been in in my life where I thought ‘You’re in the s—. This is serious. You can’t get yourself out of this. I don’t know what I’m going to do.'”

Page then came up with a plan, which 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.”

“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 star 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.”

She admitted staff told her she was “incredibly lucky,” and warned her, “Don’t ever do anything like that again.”

Page said that a couple of weeks later, Cumberbatch was also abducted and held for hours in the while filming the drama.

The Doctor Strange actor spoke about the incident in January in an interview with Variety ahead of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of his movie The Thing with Feathers.

“It gave me a sense of time, but not necessarily a good one,” Cumberbatch told the outlet of the abduction. “It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience.”

According to Variety, Cumberbatch and his friends went diving and had a tire blowout while driving back. While stranded, they were abducted by six men, who robbed the group and drove them around for hours before tying them up and fleeing.

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The Sherlock star said the “near-death’ experience “turbo-fueled” his desire to engage in hobbies some might deem high risk, like skydiving.

“It made me go, ‘Oh, right, yeah, I could die at any moment,’ ” he told Variety. “I was throwing myself out of planes, taking all sorts of risks.”