Welsh actress Joanna Page has spoken candidly about her experiences of harassment in the entertainment industry, revealing she remained silent after being groped by a television presenter because she did not want to “make a fuss”.
The 48-year-old star, best known for her role as Stacey Shipman in the hit comedy Gavin and Stacey, recalled how she had been warned in advance about the man’s behaviour. A producer, she said, had advised her that the presenter was “very handsy with the women”, adding: “I think he’s going to like you, so just be prepared.”
Page told the PA news agency: “And it was like ‘oh, Ok, right, well, I can deal with that.’”
During filming, the presenter groped her. Rather than confronting him, she brushed it off with humour, quipping: “God, I feel like I’m in Bristol Zoo,” as she pushed his hand away.
Page admitted she tried to keep the incident “light-hearted” and would not have considered lodging a complaint at the time.
“It’s all very well saying ‘you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that’ but you’re a woman, you’re in there and it’s so hard to get jobs anyway and you don’t want to make a fuss,” she explained.
“I couldn’t have sat in a studio and gone ‘excuse me, can we please just stop this because he’s touching me up and completely groping me? I’m not happy with this’.
“For starters, I’m a people pleaser. I don’t want to make a fuss or draw attention to what’s going on. I just want to get on with it. So, the only way to deal with it was laugh it off.”
Page, who has chosen not to name the presenter for legal reasons, also recalled another unsettling encounter during the run of a stage play. She described being in her dressing room, wearing only her underwear, when a well-known director walked in uninvited.
“I remember being in my knickers and wrapping the curtain around me and this director coming and hugging me and wanting to give me a kiss and not leaving me alone,” she said.
“I remember holding on to the curtain and not letting it go and just carrying on the conversation, being all polite and really nice, until eventually he went because nothing was going to happen.”
Reflecting on her career, Page said such behaviour was far from unusual. “It wasn’t every single job I went into, but in lots of different jobs there would be one type of thing,” she noted.
While she welcomed progress in recent years — such as the introduction of intimacy coordinators and reporting systems — she fears the industry will always attract “predators”.
“When you’ve got young, beautiful girls who are desperate to get a job,” she said, “there’s too much opportunity for it to happen in this profession.”
Page, who recently published her memoir Lush! My Story – From Swansea to Stacey and Everything In Between, described the process of writing the book as “like a therapy session”. She revealed much of it was drafted in unusual places, including a pub car park, a cricket club, and even outside her own home late at night.
Her reflections come in the wake of Gavin and Stacey’s record-breaking return last Christmas. The final episode attracted an audience of more than 19 million, making it one of the most-watched scripted television programmes of the century.
Alongside her acting career, Page co-hosts the BBC podcast Off The Telly with EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy, and has appeared in films including From Hell and Love Actually.
