&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "From Westeros to a psych ward: Game of Thrones star Hannah Murray opens up about her terrifying ordeal inside an alleged wellness cult")
To millions of fans, Hannah Murray is best known as the resilient, soft-spoken Gilly on Game of Thrones. But behind the scenes, as her Hollywood career flourished, Murray was quietly fighting a losing battle against psychological manipulation. Six years after walking away from the spotlight, the 36-year-old actor is throwing light upon a dark, harrowing chapter of her life- her time inside an alleged wellness cult that ultimately landed her in a psychiatric ward.
In a deeply personal excerpt from her upcoming book, The Make Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, published by The Cut, Murray details how a quest for wellness quickly spiralled into a living nightmare.
Cult leader performed an exorcism on Hannah Murray
Murray revealed that her personal trainer on the sets of Kathryn Bigelow’s 2017 film Detroit introduced her to an "energy healer" named Grace. Looking for guidance, Murray confided in her, and the actress claimed her vulnerability became her gateway into a tight-knit group run by a charismatic leader she refers to only as "Steve."
Slowly, the group eroded her sense of reality. Murray recalls how Steve claimed to have "performed an exorcism" on her while she was filming Detroit. Instead of seeing her rapidly deteriorating mental state as a medical emergency, the group reframed it as a spiritual battle. Even as her mind began to fracture, Murray remembers being entirely under their spell.
“I was concerned only with the energy I could feel spiralling up through my body.”
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The breaking point arrived just hours before her official initiation ceremony into the group. While in London, Murray suffered a massive psychological breakdown. She describes hiding in a toilet cubicle, hearing Steve's voice echoing in her head, gripped by a physical agony that felt like “giving birth through my skull.”
Emergency services were called, and Murray was rushed to the Gordon Hospital in London, where she was detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act.
Even from her hospital bed, Murray sent a flurry of conflicting text messages to Steve—alternating between furiously accusing him of being an “evil cult leader” and desperately thanking him. Steve denied any wrongdoing, and Murray's brainwashed state kept her defending him.
“I had been completely taken in by everything he said,” Murray writes, reflecting on the terrifying power of her delusion. “I believed him. I believed he was not a cult leader. I believed everything he told me.”
During her involuntary stay, Murray was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Looking back at the harrowing transition from the cult's grip to medical reality, she notes with stark honesty that she entered the hospital “extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so.”
