Former Skins and Game of Thrones star Hannah Murray has opened up about the psychotic episode that landed her in hospital after she spent time in a wellness cult.
Murray looked back at the time she was drawn into a cult in a new interview with the Guardian in support of her upcoming book, ‘The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness’. The book, out this Thursday (May 28), charts her experience with “the deceptive structure of organisations that promise us ‘wellness’”.
“It’s easy to go, ‘Well, that would never happen to me,’ but we do ourselves a disservice when we start saying that, because you don’t know,” Murray said of her experience. “I had no idea I was going to go through any of the things in the book.
“I would’ve assumed I couldn’t, that I was safe. I was well educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine. I thought, ‘I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices.
“It’s important to understand why people do these things, rather than going, ‘Oh, they must be idiots.’ Or, ‘How stupid could you be?’”
Murray explained that she was originally drawn to an “energy healer” referred to in the article as Grace, who she said helped her process the turbulent period spent shooting 2017’s Detroit though a $150 “healing” session. After walking away from the session feeling positive, she began to take more classes with other members of the organisation. “I wanted to go further and further, as far as you could go,” the actress said.
She eventually met the man at the top of the group, whom the article refers to as Steve, who Murray said “exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it”. In the forthcoming book, she points out that she felt predisposed to believe in magic because of her love for the Harry Potter series as a child.
“The most appealing thing was the idea that you might discover this whole magical world just under the surface of our world. As a kid, I desperately wanted that to be true,” she said. “When I was going through psychosis, my brain was a cocktail of those stories, this idea that I had discovered the truth, which was that I had this incredible destiny. I was going to save the world. I could fly.”
As she became more enmeshed in the cult, she found was was existing on very little sleep and talking at “a million miles a second”, a symptom off bipolar disorder. She told the Guardian that while attending a five-day course in a London hotel, she had hallucinated signs and symbols everywhere, and could hear Steve’s voice in her head.
She recalled hallucinating diagrams on people’s necks that showed her how to “heal” them, and thinking: “Steve is my father and I do want to fuck Steve.”
She recalled taking refuge in a locked bathroom at the height of the psychotic episode, in which she felt like she was “giving birth through my skull.” Members of the cult then surrounded the stall with bronze tools, chanting: “Be gone, evil spirit in Hannah.”
Someone eventually called for help, and she was rushed to Gordon hospital in Bloomsbury, London, where she was detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act.
Murray was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has now retired from acting. “I hear so much, ‘We need to talk more about mental health,’” she said in the interview. “What they mean is, like, anxiety and depression. We’re all happy to talk about that. But there’s such a taboo around the idea of people who are sectioned. They are beyond the pale.”
“It felt really important to say, ‘I went through this,’” she added. “Lots of people go through this. That doesn’t mean they are bad or fucked up forever.”
Murray began her career in Skins as a teenager, playing Cassie Ainsworth in the first two seasons of the Channel 4 drama from 2007 to 2008, and later reprised her role in the final series in 2013. Her character lived with a number of mental health conditions, including anorexia and low self-esteem.
After Skins, she appeared in the West End play That Face, the ITV adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and the sci-fi thriller Womb. From 2012 to 2019, she then appeared as Gilly in Game Of Thrones – Gilly started out as a recurring character in seasons two and three before being promoted to the main cast for the remainder of the show’s run.
