Star tells of frightening time 'locked in some fella's room'

GAVIN & STACEY actress Joanna Page has revealed that moving to London as a student was a difficult period of her life.

- INDIGO JONES Reporter indigo.jones@reachplc

The Swansea-born actress moved to the big city to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) where she graduated in 1998. Many famous faces attended the prestigious school including her compatriot Sir Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston and Phoebe Waller-Bridge to name a few.

The Welsh actress told Fearne Cotton on her Happy Place podcast that she was “so naive and so innocent” when moving to London for university.

Joanna said that attending the school was brutal and that “it was kind of like abuse for two and a half years.”

Fearne opened the discussion about Joanna’s struggle at drama school saying: “You went from being an only child in Wales, cosy childhood, great relationship with your family and your relatives nearby, to RADA, which is a hardcore drama school, very famous drama school, loads of alumni have gone on to do incredible things in the acting world. But it was really quite traumatic, I hadn't realised, for you.”

Joanna explained: “Oh my God, it was awful. I was obsessed with Kenneth Branagh, and I'd read his autobiography and I had this romantic view of what RADA would be like and I was just like, ‘oh my God it's going to be wonderful’

“The auditions had been amazing, everything had been great and I was so geared up and so ready for it and it was just awful. It was kind of like abuse for two and a half years because it was all very much for the (acting) method and Stanislavski but this is the only method you do for acting. ‘We don’t do anything else and if this doesn’t work and you can’t do it, you're sh*t, you can’t act. It was just basically breaking us down but they don’t build you back up again and it was such a shock anyway to get to London.

“I was so naive and so innocent, I just turned 18, I had never lived away from home before. The minute I got to the halls of residence, I'm locked in some fella’s room.”