Love Actually star Joanna Page has recalled the traumatic moment she says she was abducted by a taxi driver while filming in South Africa for the BBC’s 2005 mini-drama To the Ends of the Earth.
The 48-year-old Welsh actor, who appeared as Marion Chumley in the dark comedy about a young English aristocrat’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) voyage from England to Australia in the 19th century, detailed the disturbing encounter on a recent episode of the Five Brilliant Things podcast.
“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 said. “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?’” she recounted, adding that she brushed off the hotel staff’s advice, insisting: “I want to do it. 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.”
The Gavin & Stacey alum remembered 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 noted. “I remember leaving the [mall] and there was a [parking lot] and loads of fellas in cars everywhere.”
She said if she hadn’t walked up to one of the drivers to ask if he could take her back to the hotel, she would’ve been “stuck.”
“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,” 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.’
“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.’”
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Despite the overwhelming fear she felt in the moment, she says came up with a plan 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 TV 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.”
Page said the hotel staff told her she was “incredibly lucky” and warned her against doing “anything like that again.”
She added that a few weeks later, her co-star Cumberbatch faced a similarly terrifying scenario.
The Oscar-nominated Power of the Dog star previously opened up about the kidnapping, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2013 that he and two of his friends were driving back to set “in South Africa, in KwaZulu-Natal, this amazing district north of Durban.”
“It was cold, and it was dark. I felt rotten. We were wary because that’s a notoriously dangerous place to drive. Then, poof, the front-right tire blows. So we got the spare, but that meant getting all of our luggage out. We were like sitting ducks, adverts for — not prosperity necessarily but materialism,” Cumberbatch, 49, said.
As he and his friends got out to change the tire, they were ambushed by six armed figures.
“They were like: ‘Look down! Look down! Put your hands on your heads! Look at the floor!’ And they started frisking us and said: ‘Where’s your money? Where’s your drugs?’ — we had smoked a bit of weed — ‘Where are your weapons?’ And at that point, this adrenaline of fight or flight just exploded in my body. I was like, ‘Oh f***, we’re f***ed!’” he recalled.
“I was scared, really scared. I said: ‘What are you going to do with us? Are you going to kill us?’ I was really worried that I was going to get raped or molested or just tortured or toyed with in some way, some act of control and savagery.”
The trio was eventually released by their captors, without explanation.
Reflecting on the “near-death” experience, Cumberbatch said: “It really, really enriches your values in life. It’s incredibly important.”
