“Actually … dear” star Joanna Page: Actress was kidnapped in South Africa

“Actually … dear” star Joanna Page (48) has disclosed a shocking experience from her past in a podcast. In the latest with Russell Howard, the actress describes that she was kept hostage in South Africa around 20 years ago in South Africa while filming.

Page traveled to South Africa for the BBC mini series “To the Ends of the Earth” in 2005, where she was in front of the camera alongside Benedict Cumberbatch (49) and Sam Neill (78). Already when she arrived she was warned in the hotel: she should never move without accompaniment, the danger was too great. But Page, who later came to the cast, found the specifications to be exaggerated. “I was bored and wanted to do something,” she recalls. So she had a taxi called and drove alone to a shopping center.

There she spent the day until everything suddenly changed in the late afternoon. “It was as if the atmosphere was tipping. The mood became dark, threatening,” she says. Without her own car, without precise orientation, she desperately searched for a way back to the hotel.

In her need, Page finally spoke to a man in the parking lot sitting in the car and asked him to bring him back. But what started as a rescue quickly developed into a nightmare: “He drove and started threatening me. He said he would bring me somewhere, I had to move out and he would take photos of me.”

For 90 minutes the man drove her aimlessly through the area while the actress feared her life. “Usually you think you can get out of unpleasant situations,” she says. “But this time I knew: that’s serious. You can’t just talk yourself out of here.”

In her panic she came up with an idea – as unusual as it is life -saving. “I thought: If I make him laugh when I react cheeky, funny, almost coquettish, he could forget the threat.” And that is exactly what she did: she joked, parried his words with cheeky answers, played the dangerous game and survived.

At some point, after endless rounds, the driver actually stopped in front of her hotel. Page ran in immediately, completely dissolved. “The employees told me I got away incredibly happily. And they warned me not to risk anything like this again.”

A few weeks later, her colleague Benedict Cumberbatch also had a kidnapping while filming. He was kidnapped by armed and held for several hours. If he described the experience a few months ago as a “near -death experience”, which shaped him sustainably: “It made me take risks – parachute jumping, dangerous adventures. I only thought: I could die at any time.”