There is hardly any eye shadow and not much mascara visible on Joanna Page's grinning face. Out of character she is not used to wearing makeup at all though, she tells me, and the unaccustomed feeling is not improved by the fact her eyes are "all worn out" from tears. The day before she spent a lot of time crying, she says, while watching The Notebook, starring a lovelorn Ryan Gosling. "Someone did warn me it was very sad. It's a good job I didn't see it in a cinema because I was really wailing."
Thanks to frequent re-runs of Gavin & Stacey, Page is still closely identified with Stacey, her sweetly straightforward character in the acclaimed BBC sitcom.
It was only a part, but the fresh and winsome associations she built up in such a hit show are not easily brushed away. Especially when you look at her. Although she was 34 on Friday, she knows she seems much younger and may well be offered the role of ingenue for some time yet.
One of Page's first television parts, back in 1999, was Dora Spenlow, the petted, pretty wife of David Copperfield in a BBC serialisation. "She is so childlike: a child-woman. But I do have to admit Dora is very much the same as me. I have even got a little Jack Russell that I adore, just like Dora has her dog, Jip."
Page's husband, James Thornton, star of Emmerdale, was in the Dickens serial too, although the two did not meet until later. "He basically thought I would be Dora; in a big pink dress, with long hair. He thought I was posh and didn't even realise I was Welsh. Now that he has got to know me well, it turns out I actually am a bubbly sort of child-woman."
Page appears next in The Syndicate, a five-part BBC1 drama written by Kay Mellor, about a group of supermarket workers in Leeds who win the lottery jackpot. "We are all desperate for money and then we win about four million each," says Page. "This time my part isn't sweet at all. She is really mysterious and she has left a secret behind her in Wales. She does not want to be found."
Should Page ever win the lottery, she can list her spending priorities without hesitation. After sorting out the housing needs of close friends and family, she would buy a farm, fill it with sheep and dogs, set up an animal charity, and then buy a boat. "A really small, little one, and put all the animals on, and then go up and down the Thames. And that would be me done. Oh, then I would go back to work."
Her appetite for working, no matter what, is evident in the swift succession of film and television projects coming up. After The Syndicate, Page will appear in Gates, a Sky1 comedy about schools and parents, and then opposite David Tennant in the sequel to the festive British film Nativity.
All the same, Page makes time to regularly check her online lottery account, a bad habit she picked up before making The Syndicate. "I was so shocked when that young couple won the EuroMillions last year," she explains. "When I saw her say she was feeling lucky that day and just went on the internet to pick one line of numbers, I thought, 'I am setting up an online account for a month.'" So far, several months on, she tells me, her numbers have come up three times but the winnings amount to less than a tenner. "I am very optimistic. I will win big one day."
Page not only has a mesmerically positive attitude but, I realise listening back to our talk later, very fast delivery indeed. Surely the digital recorder is running at double speed? No, apparently not. She is the kind of person you feel compelled to ask a question every so often, simply to give her time to stop and breathe.
Born in Swansea to a mechanic father and a mother who worked in a bank, Page is an only child and basked in parental adoration. "As a girl I literally could do anything and they would think it was amazing." She remains grateful for the sense of wellbeing this gave her but can see a downside too. "It can be quite a burden sometimes. I was told everything about me was wonderful when I was young. Then when I came to London at 18, I realised that things I had thought were perfectly fine perhaps weren't. Suddenly you are told, actually, you aren't the best person for a role. And that's hard, because I do think I am the best at everything I do!"
There is no "massive life plan", Page insists. "I don't sit down and think, now I want to have my family and then I want to write my own series." What there is instead is a queue of "absolute dreams" waiting to be fulfilled.
As a student at Rada she visited the National Theatre and bent down to kiss the stage, vowing to return. Before her studies were complete she was back, appearing in The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie alongside Fiona Shaw.
Page is amused by the idea she had to struggle through dark times before writers James Corden and Ruth Jones gifted her with fame in the role of Stacey. During those early years she appeared with Maggie Smith in David Copperfield and was directed by Jonathan Miller at the Almeida. She glows at the memory and says she is always most happy in rehearsal, working on a text in flip-flops and jeans. "That is when you remember why you love it. You don't do this job because you want to show off. I can't bear doing karaoke. But give me a script…"
The current goal is an imminent move to Oxfordshire with her husband. "We saw this house, oh, last Christmas. Now it looks set: by the end of next month I should be living in the countryside in a thatched cottage."
It will be like "living in a Marple", Page says, "without the murders." And she will not miss London and longs to cook on an Aga. The fleshpots of the city have never appealed and there is also a sense that she will enjoy hiding from her growing public profile. "I don't go out a lot. The other day I was in the middle of doing the house cleaning and there was a knock on the door and I opened it to some man who went: "Oh good God, it's you. What are you doing here?"
When prospective house buyers visited last year they found only photographs of the couple's dog on the mantelpiece. "We hid all the photos of the pair of us so people wouldn'tknow."
It seems fans are not always sensitive. "In a cab the other day the driver said his wife told him to watch Gavin & Stacey but he just couldn't because of the Welsh accent. It's horrible, he said. Although he did add he is now addicted."
Page is surprised when she hears how strong her accent is because she thinks she has "gone quite English now". At Rada she recalls praying for a big, new vogue for Welsh drama, just as Scottish and Northern accents have had their time in the sun.
"I love it that the Welsh moment was with Gavin & Stacey! Now when I go up for jobs, they want me to be Welsh. It's really nice."
She found drama school a painful experience at first and spent a lot of time on pay phones to her parents in Wales. "It was really hard. I had just turned 18 and I was desperately homesick. The teachers wanted to strip me of everything that was Welsh and sweet. I felt a bit battered."
Maxine Peake became a good friend, and remains so, but Page has put competitive Rada days behind her. She even finds going in to see a West End show a challenge. "It is like work. I sit there and think, why didn't I get that part? Or, why wasn't I up for it? I didn't even see James Corden in One Man, Two Guvnors, but that is mainly because I was in Manchester appearing in Private Lives."
She may fly out to see Corden on Broadway, but has issues with crossing the Atlantic when it comes to her own work. "I would have to sedate my dog for eight hours for the flight to LA. I don't want to do that to just go and look around forjobs."
For now, Page wants to stay in Britain and choose curtains for her new country home. "If it doesn't go well here, I can always go out there later. As I look 14 anyway, I can just start again."
