Hannah Murray, best known for roles in Game of Thrones and Skins, says a $150 healing session she bought through a wellness cult led to classes, a five-day London course, a psychotic episode, and a 28-day hospital detention under the Mental Health Act—later fo
Hannah Murray didn’t describe the descent into the wellness cult like a cautionary tale meant to impress—she described it like something she lived through, step by step, until her life was pulled into a system she says she didn’t understand until it was already reshaping her mind.
The 36-year-old actress. known for playing Gilly on Game of Thrones and Cassie Ainsworth on Skins. is speaking out about the past decade she spent becoming involved with the organization. She traces how it began after she formed a friendship with someone on the set of the movie Detroit in 2017. and then spent $150 on a healing session. That single purchase, she says, led to a class—and from there, more involvement.
In her new book, The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, Murray writes about being drawn deeper. “I wanted to go further and further, as far as you could go,” she told The Guardian. As she climbed closer to the top. she says she saw what she described as a pyramid structure. one she writes was designed to exploit everyone trying to reach it—except for “one person. one man. who sat at the very top.”.
That man, whom she says she didn’t get to meet until she paid for expensive courses, is described by Murray as someone who “exuded power” in a way she says she’d never seen before. “Magical power … I knew I was in the presence of a magician,” she wrote.
Murray connects the cult’s appeal to her own childhood. She says she was a Harry Potter fan and that the idea of a hidden magical world beneath everyday life felt intensely real to her as a kid. When she later went through psychosis. she says her brain turned those stories into something she experienced as truth—an idea that she had discovered reality and that she had an incredible destiny. “I was going to save the world. I could fly.”.
The account also includes what she says she felt inside the organization: a sexual presence. When she shared it with teachers, she says her concerns were dismissed. She writes that they told her Steve. the leader. was “just really good at breaking down your ego and so a lot of sexual stuff might come up.”.
The turning point, Murray says, came after she joined a five-day course at a London hotel. She says it triggered a psychotic episode in which she was rushed to a hospital and detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act. Afterward, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“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 told The Guardian. She says she had believed she was protected by her background and decisions—educated. raised in a middle-class family. and confident in her own judgment. “I’m smart. I make good choices. Well, I made terrible choices.”.
She also pushes back on how people sometimes talk about situations like hers. “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 added.
Hannah Murray Game of Thrones Skins wellness cult mental health act psychotic episode bipolar disorder The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness