‘I thought I was the saviour of the planet’: how Game of Thrones’ Hannah Murray found a wellness cult – and lost her mind
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At least once a week, Hannah Murray has this one overpowering thought: “Thank God I don’t act any more.” She might be climbing her stairs, mug in hand, or at her desk opening her computer, she might be taking a casserole from the oven, or browsing the high street in the East Anglian town where she now lives. The thought will arrive along with what she describes as a sort of total bodily relief. She tries to hold on to this “I’m not an actor any more” feeling because it’s accompanied, she says, by “a real surge of joy”.
It’s not just because she doesn’t have to strip for the camera any more, although there was plenty of that, starting with Cassie, whom she played aged 17 in the E4 hit show Skins, mostly in underwear. And it’s not because she doesn’t have to cope with the relentless focus on her weight, though there was plenty of that too, accompanied by questions from journalists: was she anorexic in real life? Were her parents worried about her weight? It’s not because she’s not recognised everywhere, as she was after playing Gilly in Game of Thrones, with grown men having tantrums if she didn’t autograph their whatever or pose for a selfie. Nor is it having to negotiate which body parts she will contractually agree to show. Or contending with the highs of landing a great part followed by the lows of wrapping the shoot only to be thrown back on to the audition carousel and told: “Please go in looking nice. They need to believe Benedict Cumberbatch could actually be attracted to you.”
It’s a mixture of all these things. Plus, the lifestyle, the booze, the drugs, the reckless sex (she once took a Kurt Cobain lookalike to a loo cubicle in a Detroit nightclub simply because, yes, he looked like the long-dead Nirvana singer). She knows it was all desperate, a bid to feel special. “That was a big factor of being an actor: being chosen for a role makes you feel incredibly special. But it lasts only for that project. I was on this hamster wheel of, ‘Where’s the thing that’s going to make me feel special for ever?’” She tried reading from the personal growth section of the bookshop – the gateway drug, as she wryly calls those books now. She tried meditation, gratitude diaries, she had two psychoanalysts.
Given all that, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, by the age of 27, Murray had been drawn into a wellness cult – a cult so ludicrous, looking back, the head guy wore a symbolic necklace and carried a giant Starbucks cup. It promised wisdom and specialness while costing her thousands. Far worse, however, was the cost to her mental health. Murray experienced a psychotic episode so catastrophic, she was sectioned in an acute mental health unit. Later, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder.
In the nine years since, Murray has tried to make sense of what happened. Mostly through writing down everything she could remember of that intense decade, raking through texts, notes, films, and talking to friends. The result is The Make-Believe, a frank and often darkly funny exploration of the convergence of hedonism with the self-help industry that led her headlong into “the underbelly of the wellness and spiritual world”.
While Murray is best known for Skins (three series) and Game of Thrones (five series), she appeared in a host of film, TV and stage roles that drew on her vulnerability, her innate rawness and something unquantifiable that made her mesmerising to watch. Not least, there was the teen suicide movie Bridgend (2015), for which she won best actress in three separate awards; US race riots film Detroit (2017); and the Manson Family movie Charlie Says (2018). Somehow she also squeezed in a degree in English at Cambridge.
Today, sitting opposite me in a cafe in the Barbican, in London, she is fresh-faced, her brown hair middle-parted, shirt open over a bright, striped top. The two cans of fizzy water she’s ordered are on the table when I sit down. Mostly her hands are hidden in her lap, but occasionally, while recalling a fact or anecdote, she’ll loop strands of hair in her fingers. The provincial town, the cooking, the writing, that’s all part of the non-drinking, non-smoking, post-acting, post-cult Murray, now 36.
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Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/may/23/hannah-murray-interview-wellness-cult-sectioned.
