Hollywood loves a tidy story: you land a hit show, you ride the dragon into a lifetime of prestige and paychecks. Hannah Murray’s version is uglier, and a lot more believable.
Murray, who played Gilly onGame of Thronesacross seven seasons, says the years after the series weren’t some victory lap. They were a grind of auditions she experienced as flat-out humiliating, a slide into a group she describes as cult-like orbiting an “energy healer,” and eventually a psychiatric hospitalization where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She lays it out in a memoir,The Make-Believe, due next month.
Seven seasons on a global juggernaut, and still no safety net
Americans tend to assume that if you’re on a monster franchise, especially one that became a weekly group therapy session for half the internet, you’re set. But Murray wasn’t the face on the lunchbox. She was a recognizable supporting character, which in this business can mean you’re famous enough to be judged and not powerful enough to be protected.
In her telling, the real misery wasn’t theThronesset schedule. It was the afterlife: the endless proving-yourself loop, the cattle-call casting rooms, the sense that your “value” is how much disrespect you can swallow with a pleasant smile.
And she’s not describing some rare, exotic Hollywood disease. Supporting actors, even ones viewers can name, often bounce between short gigs and long dry spells, living at the mercy of gatekeepers who can confuse “high standards” with casual cruelty.
Auditions as psychological warfare
Murray says the core of the book is what auditions did to her head. She describes the stress as terrifying. She keeps coming back to one word: humiliation.
Anyone who’s spent five minutes around the entertainment industry knows auditions are supposed to be judgment. But there’s a line between direction and degradation, and Murray’s account lands on the wrong side of it, over and over. When you’re young, ambitious, and constantly being evaluated, that kind of environment doesn’t just bruise your ego. It can rewire how you see yourself.
She also describes a slow internal collapse: the way repeated rejection stops being about a single role and starts feeling like a verdict on your right to be in the room at all. Not a dramatic crash. A long leak, insomnia, dread, exhaustion, isolation.
An “energy healer,” a charismatic leader, and the cult logic
When people are worn down, they reach for relief. Murray says that’s when she met an “energy healer,” someone presented as able to fix people by channeling energy through his hands, less medicine, more spiritual reset button.
Her description follows a familiar script: it doesn’t start with “join my cult.” It starts with attention, certainty, and a neat little story that explains your pain. Then the price of feeling better becomes deeper commitment. Murray says she got pulled further in, including what she describes as significant financial spending framed as the cost of spiritual progress.
The darkest part is the isolation. She says she drifted away from family and friends, classic move in high-control groups, where the outside world is treated like contamination. She also says she fell in love with the leader, which turns ideology into emotional dependency. Now you’re not just buying the belief system, you’re bonded to the person selling it.
And the trap tightens: if you’re not improving, it’s because you’re not committed enough. Not faithful enough. Not paying enough, financially or psychologically, to “earn” the healing.
The psych ward, a bipolar diagnosis, and a break from the grip
Then comes the crisis. Murray describes a breakdown that led to psychiatric hospitalization, where she says she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
That moment, in her account, is where the fantasy of control finally collapses. When you’re in a hospital because your mind is on fire, the “energy” story starts to sound like what it is: a sales pitch dressed up as salvation.
She frames the hospitalization as a turning point, choosing medical care and reclaiming agency after a period where other people, especially the group’s leader, had been defining what was “wrong” with her and what she needed to do to be “fixed.”
Underneath it is a blunt clash between two narratives of suffering. One offers total explanation, often with a side of blame, and a pay-to-advance ladder overseen by a guru. The other is clinical: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, no miracles promised, just work.
The Make-Believe: seven years of writing to take her story back
Murray says she spent seven years writingThe Make-Believe. That timeline matters. This doesn’t read like a quick celebrity cash-in timed to an anniversary and a publicity cycle. It reads like someone trying to put a shattered period into a sequence she can live with.
The title is doing a lot of work. “Make-believe” is acting, obviously. But it’s also denial, performance-as-survival, the way you can pretend you’re fine until pretending becomes its own kind of danger.
If Murray’s account lands with readers, it won’t be because it’s glamorous. It’ll be because it’s a reminder that visibility isn’t stability, that the casting system can be a meat grinder for people without leverage, and that pseudo-therapeutic movements have a knack for scooping up the exhausted, especially when the real institutions around them are cold, competitive, and happy to look away.
