Joanna Page admits she told family Gavin And Stacey ending despite secrecy vow

Gavin And Stacey star Joanna Page told her husband and mother straight away about the show’s Christmas finale despite being sworn to secrecy.

The mother-of-four, who played Stacey Shipman in the hit BBC comedy, said she had cried throughout the filming but remained calm while watching it with her family last Christmas Day.

She only burst into tears while watching the behind-the-scenes documentary Gavin And Stacey: A Fond Farewell.

Page described sitting down with her family to watch last Christmas’s finale with her family at their home in Oxfordshire.

“We all sat down and I can’t actually believe we did it because I was really quite tense and what I really wanted to do instinctively was to say to everybody: ‘Go away, I just want to sit in a room and watch it on my own,’” Page, who grew up in Swansea, said.

“But we all watched it together and it was just silent, and nobody messed around. All you could hear was this sort of little crying from my Mum kind of all the way through.

“Weirdly I didn’t cry through any of it watching it on Christmas Day even though I’d been crying so much all the way through.

“And it was only afterwards, round about new year when we watched the behind the scenes documentary, that really set me off and I just couldn’t stop crying for that whole day then.

“It was borderline traumatic.”

Page, who is married to fellow actor James Thornton, was speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival about her new autobiography Lush!: My Story – From Swansea To Stacey And Everything In Between.

The actor said an out-of-the-blue missed call from Gavin And Stacey co-writer James Corden tipped her off that the finale was on – meaning the 2019 Christmas special cliffhanger of Nessa’s proposal to Smithy would be resolved.

“I just thought: ‘Oh my God, it’s happening, it’s happening’. I was excited because I thought: ‘I’m going to know if he says yes, I’m going to know if he says yes,’” she said.

“When they said: ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ I said: ‘Oh my God, James, of course I won’t.’

“I put the phone down and phoned my mother. And then I told my husband and then when the script arrived, I just showed it to Mum straight away and James.

“One time I was trying to learn my lines, and I was sitting on the bed in my bedroom with my Mum going over the lines and I made my daughter go out of the room.

“She had a funny look on her face as she was leaving, and I looked under the bed and she put her iPad under there and on record. I took it out and deleted it.”

Page also spoke of her time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) where she was constantly told she could not act, and described the last time she was there.

“I’d left early to go and work at the Royal National Theatre and I was doing the Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and I came back because I wanted to my three, which is when you do your monologues to get agents,” she said.

“I had an agent by that point, but it was a point of principle, and I wanted to go back and I wanted to do my three.

“I did it and then a director’s assistant, who I had to work with there, came up to me and he said: ‘I know what it is. All these years I always thought that you were shit, but it’s not that, it’s that you’re Welsh.’

“I couldn’t believe it. I turned around and I walked out, and I have never ever been back since.”

Page said during her career she had suffered “loads” of MeToo moments and said it was the “norm”.

“I remember one particular job I was doing on the telly and there was this one actor, and nobody liked working with him,” she said.

“He was just very difficult to work with and was just so sort of smutty in everything he was saying, but you just had to get on with it.

“As a young female it’s utterly terrifying and if somebody says stuff that is really inappropriate it is very difficult as a young woman to go: ‘Can we just stop filming?’

“It was me and him and we had to go out filming, and he literally spent the whole day singing songs and basically telling me what he was going to shove up my arse.

“In moments like that I just went completely mute, and I just had to endure it all day.

“I literally couldn’t speak. I got back to my trailer at the end of filming, and I told the producer straight away.”