Joanna Page: I’ve always had a problem with being sexy

By Hannah Stephenson, PA

Gavin & Stacey star Joanna Page is talking sex – on screen, off screen, feeling uncomfortable playing sexy women, her experiences of nudity scenes, sexual harassment, and her ambitions to be a sex therapist.

The bubbly Swansea-born actress and presenter seems as much of an open book as her famous fictional alter ego Stacey Shipman as she speedily relays an endless stream of thoughts in that trademark Welsh lilt, barely pausing for breath, recalling eye-opening anecdotes which feature in her new autobiography, Lush!

Now 48, living in Oxfordshire with husband ex-Emmerdale actor James Thornton and their four children, Eva, 12, Kit, 10, Noah, eight, and three-year-old Boe, four guinea pigs and two dogs, Page says she’s at a different place in her life and a fitting one to write her memoir.

Thornton, to whom she has been married for nearly 22 years, features prominently, as does family life and the juggling they have to do.

“We had sex once!” she states frankly when talking about conceiving their fourth child when she was 44, before conversation skitters to the argument she and Thornton had earlier in the day re the school run.

“We’ll have a good old barney, which kind of clears the air,” she elaborates, explaining that sitting down and having a chat always gets things back on track.

“I’m like, before we have sex, I’m sorry but I need to sit down and have a coffee and we need to have a massive conversation. Then at the end of it I’ll have sex with him.”

No date nights, then?

“God, we haven’t had a date night in 12 years!” she exclaims. The endlessly amusing asides make it impossible not to warm to her.

From her happy childhood in Swansea to her unhappy days at RADA, where teachers were so negative it ruined her confidence – but she made a good friend in acting peer Maxine Peake – to her life as a jobbing actress on stage and screen, triumphs and disappointments and the pure joy of working with the dream team on Gavin & Stacey, the book leaves no stone unturned.

Of course, her memories of the hit series loom large, the tears they all cried during the final Christmas episode, the love in the room. They try to see each other for coffee and keep in touch through a WhatsApp group called Christmas Is Occurring, but she has grieved over the end of the show.

“It’s kind of like that with every job you do. You finish the job and you have to come home and then you grieve because you’ve left your family. But with Gavin & Stacey it was huge.

“Sometimes when it comes on TV I just have to flick it off because it’s too painful, because I just loved everybody so much on it, so I’d rather just not look at any of it.”

However, not all her encounters have been as wonderful as that iconic series.

She’s had experiences to overcome, including sexual harassment, being groped by a TV presenter after being forewarned by the female producer that he could be “very handsy with the women” and would probably start touching her but that was just him and not to worry about it.

“It was like, ‘Oh, OK, right, well, I can deal with that. So I went out on set and we’re filming and then he starts groping me and I said something like, ‘God, I feel like I’m in Bristol Zoo’ and knocked his hand away.”

Page says she tried to keep it lighthearted and wouldn’t have dreamed of making a complaint.

“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.

“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.”

She thinks sexual harassment probably still goes on.

“There are always going to be predators in an environment like this when you’ve got young, beautiful girls who are desperate to get a job. It is so hard to get that job.

“Most of the time the people who are giving you those jobs are older men and they know that you want the job and there’s a million girls out there trying to get the job. I think that will continue.

“I think things have got better and you’ve got intimacy coaches now who are fantastic,” she continues. “There’s a lot more safety there and you’ve got phone numbers you can phone to report people if you feel like you’re being bullied.

“But I think, personally, that it’s always going to continue because there’s too much opportunity for it to happen in this profession.”

Nudity – and how she has handled it in her career – is another topic she explores in the book, most famously when she did the naked scenes with actor Martin Freeman in the 2003 hit film, Love Actually.

“It was terrifying at first because obviously you’re standing there completely naked but because you’re naked and you’re being innocent, after a while it just becomes incredibly easy.

“The reality of it is that you’re in a room and there are so many people around you and you aren’t completely naked. You’ve got so many bits and pieces of stuff stuck over your nipples or all around your crotch. I remember putting my g-string on back to front because it was so damn thin on both sides.

“To be honest, I’ve always had a problem with being sexy or being naked and sexy. It just makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t think I’m very good at it. But with John and Judy (the characters played by Freeman and Page), it was just so not sexual.”

The role, however, raised her profile significantly.

“I just became known as the naked one from Love Actually. Straight away people would know who I was, that sweet Welsh girl. That’s how Ruth (Jones) got me in for Gavin & Stacey.

“She and James were talking and they said, ‘Why don’t we get the Welsh girl in from Love Actually?’”

Jobs came and went, but by 2006 work started drying up. At one point she got a job in a shoe shop – and two weeks later the Gavin & Stacey role came up. It remained, on and off, part of her life for 17 years until the final episode on Christmas Day last year. She took six years off acting in the interim to raise her family.

For the time being, she’s focusing on presenting, and will be fronting Shift The Thrift, a new BBC1 game show in which two contestants buy charity shop items, upcycle them and compete for a profit at auction.

Other career strands she is considering include farming, becoming a yoga instructor and training to be a sex therapist.

“I’m in talks at the moment about training to be one and doing something on it.”

She says people often open up to her and recalls a DPD driver recently pouring his heart out to her about his pregnant girlfriend and whether they should keep the baby.

“I was sitting in the back of the van talking to him about it when my husband came up and said, ‘Jo, what’s going on?’”

Gavin & Stacey may remain the series she holds dearest to her heart, but she can’t imagine any spin-offs, although she thinks that there’s more scope for characters Dawn and Pete.

“I can’t imagine any spin-offs from it because it just seems so perfect as its own little bubble.”

Lush! My Story – From Swansea to Stacey and Everything in Between by Joanna Page is published by Sphere on September 25th, priced £25.