Hannah Murray Stopped Playing Make-Believe

“There was a core mystery for me at the heart of this experience — was it magic, or was I mad?” Hannah Murray writes in her memoir, The Make-Believe. The experience in question was a psychotic break that Murray endured in 2017 after spending several months involved with a wellness cult, coming to believe herself capable of powerful healing abilities. In the years leading up to Murray’s breakdown, she’d been a consummate character actor — best known to audiences for her longtime stints playing Cassie on Skins and Gilly on Game of Thrones. The more she worked, however, the more she excavated her own traumas and unease, and she became increasingly desperate to fix that which she saw as wrong with herself.

In the years since she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and worked to regain control over her life, Murray began writing her memoir in an attempt to not solve, but reflect what she experienced. In doing so, she upended her career — retired from acting, went back to school, and spent seven years working to show herself and the world what happened to her. The Make-Believe is a harrowing read, as Murray navigates a predatory unnamed wellness cult in the lead-up to her collapse, but it’s not a punishing experience. Murray — like the characters she once played — is mercurial and wry, and The Make-Believe is fearless in its depiction of psychosis and criticisms toward the world of wellness. Vulture spoke to Murray over video about her pivot to the writing life and how she’s pursued recovery without succumbing to the wellness industry.

You’ve done your fair share of press tours across your career. What does it feel like to be doing it for something you’ve made? 
It does feel very different, because you can’t look at the other actor that’s sat next to you and be like, “Hmmm, you answer that one.” [Laughs.] Those big press junkets for a big TV show have you fielding a lot of questions very quickly to search for sound-bitey answers. It’s been really nice to have kind of real chats about real things. I’m still so interested in what happened to me, which is why I wrote about it, and I’m also very interested in talking about it as well.

You worked on the book for seven years, just about the whole time since you stepped away from acting. You also went back to school to work on the book. There were probably several different academic avenues that could have helped you work through this process — psychology, or something like that — why did creative writing feel like the one you wanted to pursue?
I’d written probably over 100,000 words working on the book on my own, back when I was still kidding myself that it was just for me as a therapeutic exercise. I couldn’t stop writing and I wrote so much and then I started to get more of a sense that I was writing a memoir. When I made that decision, it then became a question of, “How do I understand what I’m doing better?”

How did your reading habits change as you started to work more on the book?
I always thought I read quite widely in terms of genre, but really I had pretty exclusively read fiction for most of my reading life, so suddenly I thought, I should read some memoirs. I discovered how much I love that form, and all that you can do in the world of creative nonfiction that feels novelistic, like Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo. I’d thought of nonfiction as very factual and very researched and maybe a bit dry, but then I was reading such a range of things: I read celebrity memoirs and I read memoirs by people I’d never heard of who’d had really interesting lives. Some of them were incredibly creatively innovative. I loved In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado.

Part of what led you down this path to wellness was the excavation required for acting. That’s often a huge part of writing as well. What kind of precautions did you take to avoid feeling as vulnerable?
In some ways, it was helpful to have made such reckless mistakes as an actor. I understood the risks of excavating trauma with no boundaries. In the early stages of writing, when it was pouring out of me, I did have days where I would write for too long and then sleep for the whole afternoon because I was so drained. I started to put some rules in place for myself. Setting guardrails was super helpful, and I was quite disciplined about that.

The book is often about the ways in which wellness and self-care have become commodified and exploited — having to level up to buy things in order to feel good. You mentioned you’ve stepped away from meditation and yoga. How do you approach self-care now?
I really like things that feel incredibly simple, incredibly accessible, and free, like going for a walk or journaling every morning. Not overcomplicating it is important, and not thinking I have to reach the highest heights of self-care and be the “best version of myself.” Sometimes I’ve swung too far, maybe, in the other direction, going like “I don’t want to take care of myself” because I’m so annoyed. I’m trying to find a happy middle ground. My life has swung back and forth in this pendulum of extremes, so it’s really nice to explore the depths of the middle rather than being super high or super low.

A lot of what pulled you into this wellness cult was the pursuit of magic — is it real? Does it exist? I was wondering if you think that’s almost a kind of generational thing.
The Harry Potter generation of it all.

Or even Disney, though I know that’s a more American phenomenon. Pouring money into something in order to capture or confirm something we think was real at a certain time in our lives.
In order to talk about the magic in the book, I couldn’t avoid discussing the books and movies I was consuming at a young age. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a huge thing for me, and I think that idea of being strong and super powerful as a young woman when you can be so scared in the world really resonated at a young age. There were always these narratives that were like, “Nobody knows, but there is this world under the surface.” I think that was an expectation that had almost been set up as a child that I tried to put aside when I got older, but the child in me was so excited to discover something that felt like it could be magic.

Do you think that kind of narrative also appeals to people in the arts? That kind of intangible whatever that makes us creative?
Definitely. I did the Belle and Sebastian musical called God Help the Girl when I was 23, and the characters are in a band and they talk about the only way you can write a great song is if God chooses for you to write a great song. I do think there’s something about creative work where I look at this book now, and I’m like, “Where did you come from?” There’s things I see in it that I didn’t intentionally do. I think that can feel very magical. But also: Acting is a weird job. Writing is a weird job. It’s a strange thing to go deep into imaginative worlds, or your own memories, and examine them from all these different angles and construct something for people to read. We require overactive imaginations in those industries, which can be a really wonderful thing, but also I think my imagination could be so vivid that it made me vulnerable in certain ways.

You mentioned acting as a job, and one of the more interesting aspects of the book is just getting the perspective of a working actor and a demystification of navigating a career in that way.
I was having a conversation with someone from the creative writing program who, when I told him that the first movie I did after my episode was about the Manson family, said, “Why on earth would you have chosen to do that?” and I was like, “Because it was the job I got offered.” I needed to work and I wanted to go back to work. A lot of people outside of the industry don’t realize how little choice most actors have. There’s maybe one percent who are choosing between multiple roles and going, “What do I want to do?” and “How am I going to shape my career?” Most of us are really, really pleased to get something. I had this pattern of doing these very intense true stories, four films in a row, that I wouldn’t have designed for myself because it was exhausting. There’s this attitude sometimes that I encountered where people would say, “What do you have to complain about?” and “Shouldn’t you just be grateful that you’re going to do this thing that loads of people want to do?” I was really grateful and I did feel really lucky and very privileged, but that didn’t mean there weren’t things about it that were hard as well. My unwillingness to admit that it was hard made it harder for me to process.

You’ve said you don’t have any plans to return to acting. Do you still watch much TV or film?
I don’t watch much at all anymore. I’m hoping it’s just a sabbatical, because doing film was such a great love of mine. I used to go to the cinema and see everything that came out. I think I needed a break from watching stuff because it felt like I was too in my head about my feelings about the industry to be present in enjoying a TV show. I also read so much now, and it’s hard to do both to the amount that I would like to. I like the kind of privacy and intimacy of reading, and that I can just do it very quietly at home. I also really like the sense of creation when you’re reading, where you’re imagining things and creating a story with the author, whereas I feel like sometimes watching a show or movie could be a little more passive for me.

Do you have a particularly favorite response from friends or people who have read the book?
Since publication, it’s really been gratifying to hear from people, some of whom I’m closer to and some of whom I’m not, who’ve had experience of psychosis, whether firsthand or someone close to them. Various people have said to me, “This is so accurate to my experience,” and I think there came a point where accuracy became my main goal. I was like I don’t know if I can do anything other than try to be as accurate as possible about what happened to me. To have other people say that it feels accurate to their experience is beyond what I could have hoped for.