Joanna Page has revealed she was once held hostage by a taxi driver who demanded she strip naked.

The Love Actually star recounted a terrifying incident that occurred 20 years ago while filming the BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth in South Africa.

Speaking on Russell Howard's Five Brilliant Things podcast, Page explained that, while filming the series, she had wanted to go out and do things.

"When I first arrived to film, some of the cast were there before me because (I play) a character who comes into it later," she said. "So I got to the hotel and they said, 'You can't go anywhere without your chaperone.' And I thought 'Oh, this is ridiculous, I'm really bored, I need to get out and about and do some stuff.'"

"I said, 'Can you just get me a taxi and just take me to a (mall) somewhere?'" the Gavin and Stacey actress, 48, continued. "They said, 'We really don't think you should do this,' and I said, 'I want to do it.'"

Page eventually arrived at the mall, and after wandering around for hours, she said that the atmosphere had changed.

"It just started feeling really menacing," the Welsh actress admitted. "I had no way of getting back to the hotel, I didn't have a car, I didn't really know where I was going. I remember leaving the (mall) and there was a (car park) and loads of fellas in cars everywhere."

Worried that she would be "stuck" there, she asked a man for a lift.

"So I got in the car and then he drove off and he drove me around for about an hour and (30 minutes) telling me that he was going to take me somewhere, I was going to take off all of my clothes and he was going to take photos of me," she remembered.

Unsure how to escape, she decided to laugh and joke with the driver until, after more than an hour, he finally returned her to the hotel.

"So I did that for about an hour and a half as he just drove me around and around and eventually he took me back to the hotel," the star said. "I got out of the car, ran straight up into reception. I was just (in) such a state and I told them everything that had happened."

Page added that just weeks later, her co-star Benedict Cumberbatch was also abducted and held for hours.