- Hannah Murray became involved in an exploitative cult that reportedly triggered a psychotic breakdown.
- While discussing her upcoming memoir, The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness during an interview with The Guardian, Hannah Murray revealed her struggle with mental health and spirituality.
- Hannah Murray recalled being introduced to the wellness cult group in 2017 through an energy leader she met via a personal trainer while filming Detroi
Game of Thrones star Hannah Murray opened up about a traumatic experience she went through after discovering a wellness cult. Instead of relying on yoga, spiritual reading, or crystals, the 36-year-old actress became involved in an exploitative cult that reportedly triggered a psychotic breakdown.
While discussing her upcoming memoir, The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness during an interview with The Guardian, Murray revealed her struggle with mental health and spirituality.
She recalled being introduced to a wellness cult group in 2017 through an “energy leader” she met via a personal trainer while filming Detroit. Despite believing that she was “too smart” to fall into such traps, she admitted spending thousands of dollars searching for “wisdom and specialness”.
Hannah Murray's Experience At Wellness Cult
Talking to The Guardian, Murray shared she thought she was well educated, from a middle-class family and everything should have been fine. “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?' ” she shared. Murray also revealed how one session soon became a series of classes that promised answers to her journey of self-healing which often came with a price.
“The pyramid was structured to exploit everyone who tried to climb it,” she wrote in her memoir, according to the outlet. “Except for one person, one man, who sat at the very top.” Referring to the man as Steve, Murray said that both her experience filming Game of Thrones and growing up in a world full of young adult fiction left her more vulnerable to the storylines she was offered by the cult. “He exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it. Magical power,” she remembered thinking of Steve. “I knew I was in the presence of a magician,” she added, revealing that as she became more and more involved in the cult, she began to notice signs of sexual exploitation.
“My own experience felt highly eroticised, without anything explicitly physical happening,” she told The Guardian. “There was just this charge to the energy in the room. I think there often is in these hierarchical spiritual organisations. I found it interesting that it was a primarily female space — the teachers, the healer — and then this man walks in, and he's incredibly confident and magnetic,” she added. Murray recalled that when she voiced her concerns that the organisation was a “sex cult” to one of the female teachers, she allegedly claimed that Steve was just “really good at breaking down your ego.”
Hannah Murray Opens Up About Psychotic Breakdown
The actress further revealed that after attending a five-day course in London, she realised her behaviour became erratic to the point that she was speaking at “a million miles a second". She also began to have hallucinations and delusions that Steve loved her and would marry her. As her condition grew worse, Murray said, she remembered locking herself in a bathroom while experiencing pain that felt like she was “giving birth” through her skull. On the other side of the door, the teachers gathered to chant, “Be gone, evil spirit in Hannah.”
She shared that when someone finally called for help, she was pinned to the floor by a group of men and rushed to the hospital, after which she was held for 28 days under the Mental Health Act. Murray revealed since that episode she has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“I hear so much, 'We need to talk more about mental health.' 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,” she told the outlet. “It felt really important to say, 'I went through this.' Lots of people go through this." That doesn't mean they are bad or f***ed up forever,” she added. Murray's memoir The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness will be released on June 23.
