Hannah Murray hasn’t acted in years and she’s opening up about what she’s been through for the past decade, after becoming involved with a wellness cult.
The 36-year-old actress is best known for playing Gilly in Game of Thrones and Cassie Ainsworth in Skins.
In her new book, “The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness,” Hannah is opening up about being drawn into a wellness cult after forming a friendship with someone on the set of the movie Detroit in 2017. Her $150 healing session with the woman led to her participating in a class, which led to more involvement with the organization.
“I wanted to go further and further, as far as you could go,” she told The Guardian. As she got closer to the top, she realized there was a pyramid structure. “The pyramid was structured to exploit everyone who tried to climb it. Except for one person, one man, who sat at the very top,” she wrote in her book.
The man at the top, who she didn’t get to meet until paying for expensive courses, was someone who “exuded power in a way I had never known anyone to exude it. Magical power … I knew I was in the presence of a magician.”
Hannah connected the experience in the cult to growing up as a Harry Potter fan.
“The most appealing thing was the idea that you might discover this whole magical world just under the surface of our world. As a kid, I desperately wanted that to be true,” she said. “When I was going through psychosis, my brain was a cocktail of those stories, this idea that I had discovered the truth, which was that I had this incredible destiny. I was going to save the world. I could fly.”
Hannah eventually felt a sexual presence in her experience at the organization, but suggestions to teachers were laughed off, with them telling her that Steve, the leader, is “just really good at breaking down your ego and so a lot of sexual stuff might come up.”
Hannah said that her participating in a five-day course at a London hotel led to a psychotic episode, in which she was rushed to a hospital and detained for 28 days under the Mental Health Act. She was later 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,” Hannah told The Guardian. “I had no idea I was going to go through any of the things in the book. I would’ve assumed I couldn’t, that I was safe. I was well educated, from a middle-class family; everything should have been fine. I thought, ‘I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices.”
“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.
Read more at TheGuardian.com.
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