Hannah Murray says her search for healing after filming one of the darkest projects of her career eventually led her into a wellness group that spiraled into what she described as a devastating mental health crisis.
According to Fox News, the actress best known for playing Gilly on “Game of Thrones,” opened up about the experience in a new interview with The Guardian while promoting her upcoming memoir, “The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness.”
Murray said the ordeal began after working on the 2017 film “Detroit,” which she described as emotionally exhausting because of its violent subject matter. Looking for support, she connected with an “energy healer” she called Grace.
The actress said she initially attended a $150 healing session before becoming more involved with classes connected to the unnamed organization.
“There’s not enough critical thought about wellness, particularly the way it’s been transformed into an industry,” Murray told the outlet. “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 she once believed she was too smart to fall into something dangerous.
“I was well-educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices. But it’s important to understand why people do these things, rather than going, ‘Oh, they must be idiots.’ Or, ‘How stupid could you be?’”
According to Murray, the group promoted ideas about spiritual energy, “light” inside the body and unlocking “spiritual DNA.”
“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.
Murray explained that her mental state worsened as she became more immersed in the group’s teachings.
“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,” she said.
The actress said she later met the organization’s leader, a man she referred to as Steve.
“He exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it,” Murray recalled. “Magical power… I knew I was in the presence of a magician.”
Her breaking point came during a five-day course in London, where she began hallucinating and suffering what she described as a severe psychotic episode.
Members of the group allegedly surrounded her and chanted, “Be gone, evil spirit in Hannah.”
Murray was later hospitalized in London and detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act. She was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Now stepping away from acting, Murray said she wants to challenge the stigma surrounding severe mental illness.
“I hear so much, ‘We need to talk more about mental health,’” she said. “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,’” Murray added. “Lots of people go through this. That doesn’t mean they are bad or f****ed up forever.”
