After Hannah Murray’s mental health crisis landed her in the hospital, the “Game of Thrones” actress — who had joined what she described as a wellness cult months earlier in 2017 — was so deeply immersed in its beliefs that she was convinced the psychiatric institution was a palace.
In her new book, “The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness,” the 36-year-old detailed the intense circumstances surrounding her 28-day stay at Gordon Hospital in Bloomsbury, London, and explained how she was able to begin to break free from the influence of the group’s leader, whom she describes as leading an “evil cult.”
“I had met a man who I believed was God, and I was ready to join him, to rule the world at his side, to travel to other dimensions and universes,” she wrote, recalling her awakening at the hospital. “But now I saw that I had misunderstood.”
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Murray, who played Gilly on “Game of Thrones,” was first introduced to the cult through an “energy healer” she had met on the set of her 2017 movie “Detroit,” in which she played an 18-year-old who was sexually assaulted by the police.
Because the “violent and dark” subject matter of the film took a toll on Murray, she sought guidance from an energy healer she referred to as Grace.
Murray said she first participated in a $150 “healing” session that eventually led the actress to attend more classes with other members of the organization — which she did not name.
Eventually, Murray met the cult’s leader — a man she referred to as Steve.
“He exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it,” she wrote in her book, out now. “Magical power… I knew I was in the presence of a magician.”
Murray’s intense hallucinations during a five-day retreat in London with fellow cult members led to her psychotic break and hospital stay.
“Where am I? I am in my chariot. The chariot has just arrived outside the palace. I enter the palace. I enter the room. Where is he?” she recalled asking, while detailing the hospital room in her book. “But the room feels like heaven. The room feels like him. The air is tingling with a warm energy. There is a sofa and chair and they are both blue. The blanket I am wrapped in is blue. And, of course, this is the color, because the last time I saw him was in a room with blue carpet, blue chairs, blue wallpaper and his blue eyes.”
“The door to the room opens. A man enters the room. He is a Black man, bald and overweight. He is dressed in uniform. Blue uniform, a blue lanyard that reads ‘NHS.’ But I know he is a magician. I know he can appear in disguise. I approach the man and try to kiss him. He does not let me kiss him. Then no. It is not Steve.”
Murray recalled drinking her own urine at one point as part of a cult “ritual”.
“I am alone in the room again, and I urinate into the cup and drink that too,” she wrote. “I am a Ritual Master. And this, drinking my own urine, is a powerful ritual. This is all I need now to survive. It is the most potent of potions I can drink. I am a self-contained, utterly self-sufficient being. I will never need to eat again. I survive on liquids and air and Light.”
After days in the hospital and after seeing her family and friends, Murray said she began to see glimpses of her old self and question Steve’s intentions.
“I begin to understand this is all a lot more complicated than I thought,” she wrote.
“There is no other way to describe it. My mind turning inside out and crumbling, the earth shaking beneath me, my vision shattered by jagged black lines. Steve was there for that, talking to me with an intense urgency and telling me, Magic is real. It felt like I was dying, but it felt like more than that. It felt like the end of everything, the end of life as we know it.”
“The return of my phone was like a window opening. A window onto the world, letting in fresh air and light and a little more reality,” she added.
From there, she began to question Steve via text.
“I need some more f—ing clarity on what the f— has happened to me,” she allegedly wrote in a text to Steve.
“‘If I run an evil cult, I am the worst cult leader in history,’” Murray alleged Steve wrote back to her. “‘I don’t have a compound to put people in. I don’t control people’s sleep or eating patterns. And I tell people to get their own life in order instead of being people’s ‘guru.’’”
Murray said she was still “not well” when she was discharged from the psychiatric ward 28 days later.
“I was not well when I left hospital. This is not the story of my recovery — or at least not a simple, straightforward one. I did not enter ill and leave well. I entered extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so,” she wrote.
In an interview with The Guardian, the English actress opened up about her troubling experience and detailed how she was able to escape the 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.”
“I was well-educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine,” she continued. “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?'”
These days, Murray is no longer acting and is wary of anything wellness-related.
“I hear so much, ‘We need to talk more about mental health,'” she told the outlet. “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 f—ed up forever.”
