Hannah Murray Wellness Memoir Wheel

Hannah Murray played Gilly on Game of Thrones, the quiet girl who survived beyond the wall. Off screen she lived loud for a while: whiskey at premieres, chaotic nights, the kind of youth fame encourages. Then she found a wellness path that was not yoga class twice a week. She found an organization that felt like magic until it felt like a trap.

In May 2026 she told The Guardian about it ahead of her memoir The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, out June 23. The angle is not Thrones trivia. It is how a smart, educated actor ended up in a cultish wellness network that triggered a psychotic episode and a twenty-eight-day hospital detention under the Mental Health Act.

It started after filming Detroit in 2017. Murray felt traumatized on set. A one-hundred-fifty-dollar energy healing session with a woman she calls Grace felt helpful. That led to classes. Then more classes with fees. Then a leader she calls Steve who seemed to radiate power she had never seen. She wanted to go as far as the organization allowed.

The five-day London course broke her. She spoke at a million miles per hour. She hallucinated. She believed Steve loved her and would marry her. She locked herself in a bathroom while teachers chanted to cast out an evil spirit in her. Men pinned her to the floor. An ambulance came. Gordon Hospital in Bloomsbury held her for twenty-eight days.

She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The psychiatrist's words made her history click. She has since stepped back from acting. She wakes at five, walks, avoids alcohol for three years, lives quietly alone. She is skeptical of therapy as panacea but trusts exercise and routine. She wants people to know sectioning does not mean you are ruined forever.

The wellness industry angle is what makes her story timely. Not crystals on Instagram. Exploitation dressed as healing. Paid escalations. Sexual undertones she noticed but could not name while inside. Murray says she was middle class and educated and still vulnerable. That is the warning she repeats. It could happen to you is not fearmongering in her telling. It is arithmetic.

She critiques how mental health conversations stay safe. Anxiety and depression are acceptable topics. Psychosis and hospital holds are taboo. She wants the sectioned experience visible. Lots of people go through this. That does not make them bad or broken permanently.

The memoir title fits. Make-believe as magic shows and as self-deception. Murray wrote the book by reconstructing texts, notes, films, and friend interviews across nine years. She is thirty-six. She sounds older in interviews. Trauma does that.

Game of Thrones fans will click for Gilly. They should stay for the cult mechanics. How positive first sessions become financial and psychological dependency. How charismatic leaders isolate judgment. How wellness language blocks critical thought because skepticism feels unspiritual.

I cannot verify every detail independently. Murray is the primary source. The Guardian interview is extensive. Other outlets summarized. The story is consistent: healing session, escalation, psychosis, hospital, diagnosis, recovery through structure not gurus.

Spin the wheel on memoir angles. The energy healer entry point. Steve's symbolic necklace and Starbucks cup she mentions as absurd in hindsight. The bathroom chanting. Twenty-eight days detained. Bipolar diagnosis clarity. Retirement from acting. Or the cultural critique of wellness without guardrails.

This wheel is not who played whom on Thrones. It is what happened when fame pain met an industry that sells certainty. Murray survived to write it down. June 23 puts the full version on shelves. May 2026 put the warning on the record.