Joanna Page says parts of her marriage have been 'pretty rubbish' and calls podcast 'better than therapy'

Joanna Page has spoken candidly about long-term strains in her marriage, describing parts of it as "pretty rubbish" and revealing she spent four years sleeping apart from her husband, James Thornton. The disclosures matter now because the couple have turned those private tensions into public conversation on their podcast, Lush!, which Joanna says has been therapeutic.

Joanna Page on marital strain and 'massive arguments'

The actress said that 26 years of marriage is not uniformly wonderful and that couples can move between periods that are "pretty rubbish" and moments that are "suddenly wonderful again. " She warned against abandoning a relationship at the first sign of difficulty: "Don't give up at the first sign of hard work, " she urged, adding that people must be prepared to work at marriage and to remain kind and keep a sense of humour.

James Thornton: temperament clash and the cause of fights

Joanna attributes many of their "massive arguments" to a clash of temperament: James Thornton is described as "northern and measured, " while she characterises herself as "manic, impulsive and fiery. " That personality contrast has meant the pair bicker frequently and are rarely "lovey-dovey, " she said, and the friction has at times left them hating each other or bored with one another. The contrast in moods and behaviour is presented as a clear cause that leads to repeated disputes and reconciliation cycles.

Children — Eva, Kit, Noah and Boe and household dynamics

The couple are parents to four children: daughters Eva, 13, and Boe, four, and sons Kit, 10, and Noah, nine. Joanna has described navigating life with a teenager, saying Eva's hormones are "all over the place, " with door slamming and an incident in which Eva gave Joanna the finger halfway up the stairs. Watching that behaviour made Joanna reflect on her own past moods and how they might have affected James.

Lush! podcast: two-hour studio sessions that acted like couples' therapy

The pair co-host the podcast Lush!, launched last December, and Joanna likened recording episodes to "couples' therapy. " She said James was initially nervous about broadcasting, fearing he would have nothing to say, but they spent two hours in the studio chatting. On one occasion they arrived still on bad terms — "we went in on an argument, we actually weren't even speaking" — and the conversation broke the impasse; Joanna got him to talk and, after the session, he emerged energised and reconnected.

Episodes have mined intimate territory, from bedroom secrets to practical debates such as heating. One discussion addressed "things that are better than getting back into my marital bed after four years of sleeping with Boe, " a reference Joanna makes to the prolonged co-sleeping period that made returning to the marital bed difficult.

Timeline: meeting, marriage, 26 years and the four-year separate bed period

The record includes multiple timeline details: Joanna and James are cited as married in 2003, with one entry specifying December 2003, and Joanna has described the marriage as lasting 26 years. Accounts of their first meeting differ in the available material—one item gives 1999 as the year they met on the costume drama David Copperfield, while another lists 2009 as their first meeting. Joanna's age is also variously cited as 46 and 48 in different items, and James is cited as 50 in some entries. What is clear across the material is that the couple have four children and that a period of four years spent co-sleeping with their youngest had a measurable impact on their intimacy.

What makes this notable is that a media project launched last December has doubled as a relationship intervention: the podcast's long, candid studio conversations turned an argument into a reconnection, demonstrating how public work has had private consequences for the pair.

Joanna Page has framed the marriage as a long-running partnership that survives through recurrent effort, urging patience over immediate separation and using the podcast to expose both the rough patches and the recoveries that have marked their life together.