How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Hannah Murray - ‘Everything Fell Apart’

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Hannah Murray found fame when she was just 17, playing the self-destructive Cassie in E4’s Skins. She juggled an English degree at Cambridge University alongside playing Gilly in HBO’s Game Of Thrones and went on to film Detroit, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. When the physical and mental stress required from these roles began to take its toll, Murray sought treatment from a reiki healer. From there, her life began to spiral as she became heavily involved with a ‘healing’ organisation whose promises of real-life magic and enlightenment were increasingly seductive. She ended up being sectioned after a psychotic break and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Now, she has written her first book. The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness is a deeply personal account of these events, written with compulsive lyricism. It takes readers on a journey to the edges of reality, where magic is possible, and where the liminal space between what is real and what is imagined becomes ever more porous. In this episode we delve into Hannah’s breakdown and what it taught her. We discuss living with BPD, her decision to quit acting and why, as a society, it’s so important to talk about severe mental health conditions - even if it makes us uncomfortable. Plus: when does our modern obsession with ‘wellness’ go too far? ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Introduction 04:30 Acting Roles and Emotional Toll 07:51 The Memoir 09:17 Traumatic Filming and Aftermath 11:57 Failure to Be Happy Always 16:06 Rapture Highs and Bipolar 18:14 Reiki Rabbit Hole and Cult Questions 28:50 Wellness as Addiction 30:25 Hotel Breakdown Begins 32:17 Exorcism and Delusions 33:26 Realizing You're Sectioned 35:18 Medication and Coming Back 36:12 Shame to Compassion 42:55 Bipolar Mania Explained 48:41 Leaving Acting and Moving On 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: On the nature of modern mental health discourse: "What if I want to talk about when I was drinking my own urine on a psychiatric ward? You can’t really say that at a dinner party... there is still a big taboo around psychosis, bipolar, schizophrenia, and other conditions that are less palatable and less kind of cozy." 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: The Make-Believe by Hannah Murray is available now in hardback and audio, read by Hannah https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/471422/the-make-believe-by-murray-hannah/9781529155211 Hannah will be in conversation with Jessie Cave at Kings Place on Friday 5th June. Link to tickets here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/hannah-murray-in-conversation-with-jessie-cave/ Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Jennette McCurdy - discusses childhood fame, toxic family dynamics, eating disorders, grief and how reclaiming her own identity after her mother’s death ultimately set her free: swap.fm/l/DqqwmylXlnMvnfOmG53z Marian Keyes - the bestselling writer on addiction, creative insecurity and body image: swap.fm/l/3opU8XRCVTQLV4v994U5 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Guest bookings for How To Fail only come from official @sonymusic.com emails Elizabeth and Hannah answer listener questions in our subscriber series: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now I can understand all of this as undiagnosed bipolar. And I remember thinking as I was experiencing it, like, this is so amazing. Why have I ever taken drugs? This is so much better. And I just thought, this is it. This is the magic solution. This is the silver bullet. This is the thing that will fix me. And then everything fell apart. When the word sectioned was used, I just remember kind of thinking,

that doesn't really make sense. That doesn't really fit in with what I understand. going on. This episode of How to Fail is brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that believes every time we fail, we also learn something about how to succeed better. Before we get into this episode, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation. How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive a Tim Hortons Scholarship Award.

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this is Cut Color Kill. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Cut Color Kill is available now on The Binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcast to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, add-free. Hannah Murray worked as an actor for over a decade and developed a reputation for tackling emotionally complex characters with great sensitivity from a young age.

At 17, Murray starred as the self-destructive Cassie in E4's skins. Later, she juggled an English degree at Cambridge University alongside playing Gilly, an abused Wilding who births her father's child in HBO's Game of Thrones. Her film roles include Detroit, directed by Catherine Bigelow, in which she played a survivor of police abuse, and Charlie Says, where she portrayed a real-life Manson family member. When the physical and mental stress were required from these roles began to take its toll,

Murray sought treatment from a Reiki healer. From there, her life began to spiral as she became heavily involved with a healing organization whose promises of real-life magic and enlightenment were increasingly seductive to a highly vulnerable Murray. She ended up being sectioned after a psychotic break and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Now she has written her first book, The Make Believe, a memoir of magic and madness,

is a deeply personal account of these events, written with compulsive lyricism. It takes readers on a journal, to the edges of reality, where magic seems possible, and where the liminal space between what is real and what is imagined becomes ever more porous. It has already rightly been heaped with praise from, among others, Dolly Alderton and Sophie McIntosh. The events the book details, says Murray, were intensely challenging to live through, but she adds, the process of writing them down was powerfully rewarding.

Hannah Murray, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's my honour. Having been lucky enough to read a proof copy of the make-believe, I concur with all of the praise that you have had. It is an astonishing book and one of the best memoirs I've ever read. I couldn't put it down. I felt so compelled to read every page.

I think the gift you have with language to explore some things that are so different to explain is astonishing. And I appreciate that today we're going to be talking about a lot of really difficult stuff. And I wanted to start by saying that I acknowledge that. And I also want to thank you for the gift of your communicating it. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. That's all, it's all really wonderful to hear. And I think, yeah, I sort of felt like if you're going to go on how to fail, you have to come with some real failures. Like, I wanted to respect the format. The book in many ways is about things that felt like failures that I've managed to transform into something else over time, largely by writing about them. Well, I notice in that quote that I

ended on, you said rewarding, but not healing. Yeah, there are certain words that I will use occasionally, but I find healing is a tricky one for me. I find gratitude is a tricky one for me, because those words feel so strongly associated with that kind of spiritual wellness culture that I'm now pretty allergic to. Yes, we'll get more into the meat of that. But I was so struck reading your book and doing the research this interview,

how the acting roles that you had, I mean, they were never easy comic characters, were they? Not really. There was one, I did a musical called God Help the Girl that was for me, my character, there are heavy parts of that film too, but my character was just a sunny delight. And it was the only time I really remember being,

like getting to be happy all day at work and how fun that was. And otherwise, yeah, it was a lot of really difficult stuff to dig into, I guess. And also makes you, I think, question a bit, like, why am I always being chosen for these kinds of roles? And why am I only being offered these kinds of roles?

and what does that say about me? And then, you know, it was strange to start at quite a young age playing those very challenging characters. Yes, that was going to be my question, actually. Do you think you were drawn to those roles, or do you think that casting directors were drawn to you? A bit of both, but more the latter, because there was definitely a point in my career.

Around the time I, sort of around the time I did Detroit, before that I was saying to my team, I would really love to do a comedy because they sort of asked you like, you know, what do you want to do next? And I was like, I would really love to do a comedy. And they'd be like, we've got this.

And obviously it's Catherine Bigelow and you're of course you're going to say yes. And I was always thrilled to get to play these roles and they were meaty and they were substantial and they were challenging. But I think I had back to back, I did four films in a row. Detroit was the third of those four

that were based on true events. And those true events were extremely harrowing. And I do think it had started to take its toll even before I did that movie and then that movie set me on this path that really is what the book's about. And I'm going to come on to filming Detroit in a second because that's how you open the book. But just before we do,

so many people have such personal relationships with your work with Cassie from Skins, with your role on Game of Thrones. What's that like for you now? now that being an actor for you is a thing of the past. Yeah. Do you still get people having quite visceral reactions to you? And how can you handle that? It's something I do feel relatively disconnected from in that, like, people don't really come up to me in the street,

recognise me anymore. And it happens occasionally. And when it does happen, it is clear that often that person has loved whether it's of Thrones or skins or both for a really long time and that it means an incredible amount to them. And I think for me it's always just felt quite surreal that I was in these shows that were so popular and meant so much to so many people. Because my perception of myself is only that I am me and I can't possibly be in a huge, you know, it's like you can't hold the two truths at once that you're in a TV show

and that that TV show happens to be a huge cultural phenomenon. So I think I'm kind of constantly surprised and quite moved by how much those characters still mean to people. I said in the introduction that your book, The Make Believe, is written with compulsive lyricism. And it was the closest thing that I could reach for because it's sort of poetic but pacey. Thank you. It's so good. How did you go about learning how to write? You did an English degree at Cambridge, but I don't know whether that's helpful or not.

It could be intimidating. Yeah. I think I spent many years after doing my English degree desperately wanting to write and feeling so inhibited by the things I had learned about literature there. And I think whenever I did sit down to try and write something, whether that, you know, I tried writing screenplays. I tried writing short stories and novels and nothing would ever get very far because I would immediately put on my kind of analytical Cambridge brain and tear whatever I had written to me. pieces and I think I had to kind of get a bit of distance from that undergraduate degree to really be able to write in a less inhibited way. How are you feeling about it being published?

Mostly really, really excited. Like a little dose of terrified as well and I think that's quite healthy. But I mean, yeah, I spent seven years writing it and to now be in this moment that it's it's a real book and it's about to be read by other people who I don't even know. Like, it feels phenomenally exciting. Before we get onto your failures, I wanted to go back to that scene that you open the book with where you are filming Detroit.

Yeah. And I think this displays the power of your writing because I have been lucky enough to interview a lot of actors, but I suppose I'd never really thought about the physical, and emotional cost of constantly having to replay a scene for filming purposes. And you write about this particular scene very powerfully and the impact it has on your body and then how it ends up with you and the events that we're about to explore. Do you mind just telling that story for us?

The role I played in Detroit, you know, I was playing a real woman and the biggest sort of moment that happens to that character in that film is that. that she is sexually assaulted by a police officer. Her dress is ripped off. This happened during the night of the Algiers Motel murders during the Detroit Uprising in 1960. And so to shoot the scene that you, my dress was ripped off me,

but that doesn't just happen once you do it again and again for multiple takes from different angles. I really didn't want to be distressed by that. I really didn't want to be traumatized by that because I was like, this isn't happening to me. It's not real. And the woman who I was playing was on set and it had really happened to her. And I was very conscious of the difference between doing something for pretend and as your job and actually having, you know, lived through that experience. But at the same time, your body doesn't necessarily know that it's fake.

your brain knows that it's fake. And then it just keeps happening. And you have to kind of get your makeup retouched and then they put the dress back on you. And I remember it was kind of sewn with like very loose thread so that it would rip off easily. And it was just, yeah, I just remember having very physical reactions to that that I could not shake.

And then I thought going to see an energy healer was a really good idea in response to that. And I could so relate to that feeling. feeling like a good idea as someone who also has dabbled in... I've had Reiki. Yeah. And I think you do such a good job of sort of describing each one of the steps, which in isolation doesn't seem that big of a deal until suddenly you're in too deep.

Let's get into it now. Yeah. Your first failure, and you preface this in such an eloquent email to me saying that you don't consider these failures. You wouldn't consider them failures in anyone else. No, not sure. And you've reframed them, but they felt like failures at the time. Very much so at the time, yeah.

Your first failure is failing to be happy all the time. Yes. Tell us about that. It's specifically to do with being in your 20s, isn't it? Yeah, on the surface, like, everything was great. And I had a very enviable, successful life and career. I had this kind of quite glamorous, like probably slightly too much partying kind of lifestyle, but I loved it. But a lot of the time I was really miserable.

And I didn't feel like I had a right to be miserable ever. And I thought, if I was unhappy, there was this constant sort of in a monologue of like, you're so privileged, what do you have to be sad about? Why can't you just be happy? That made the sadness only more extreme because I was then sort of beating myself up for it. And I just think I sort of thought that happiness was something I had to figure out and achieve and arrive at. And then I would be permanently happy. And it was my fault that I couldn't find the kind of perfect recipe for that in my life. And so it was always like, well, I need to exercise more.

Or I need to get up earlier and do more of a morning routine. Or I need to eat better. Or I need to quit smoking. Or I need to. It was always like there was some solution that I thought would give me this state of, of constant perfect happiness, which really no one is ever going to be in all the time. But I thought it was my kind of duty to achieve that. And I thought it was fully my responsibility.

Yeah. And then spirituality and meditation was something I kind of hadn't tried yet. And so started exploring that as maybe that's the thing that's missing. And then started to go down a bit of a rabbit hole that then quickly. fell all the way down into a quite extreme obsession with that sort of world. Before we get onto that part, which is a major part, I want to ask you a bit about the tenor of your unhappiness. Yeah.

You write very movingly in the book about knowing that your mother had five miscarriages before she had you. Yes. How much do you think that informed how you were feeling? I think it was a huge factor. I mean, the reason why I've written about that in the book is because it felt to me, when I look back on my 20s, like that was hugely informing my understanding of my place in the world, I suppose. And it was something I wrestled with a bit about including in the book because I felt like maybe this is my mother's story,

but it also impacted me and my understanding of myself from quite early childhood. And I had this feeling from quite a young age, I think, I had a kind of existential wrestling with what that meant that there were five pregnancies before me. And so potentially I sort of interpreted that as five people who could have lived lives. And I was the one that got born. And so I felt this, I think I described in the book as Survivor's guilt that I had to then sort of like a tone for and that I had to live six lives worth of experience and I guess six lives worth of happiness too, that it wasn't just enough to be alive. I had to be wonderfully gloriously alive all the time and be making the most of every day. and I did feel like I had to include it in the book

as part of why I went down the path that I went down. I'm glad you did and you expressed that so well. Alongside this feeling of unhappiness, survivor's guilt, like having to live the life of six, you also describe moments of rapture. What were they like? Absolutely incredible. There were moments, so many moments,

And they could be when I was working and my life was kind of obviously fabulous and incredible and creatively fulfilling to be on set with these incredible actors and having these kind of strange, glamorous experiences. But there were also, I could just be walking down the street and it would be raining and I'd be listening to music. And I'd suddenly feel like being alive is the best thing in the world and I'm having the most, like the best possible version. You know, when you're walking down the street, you feel like you're in a movie. that sort of feeling.

And what was so frustrating was that I didn't know, I couldn't control when that feeling came and went, which now I can understand all of this as undiagnosed bipolar, but I didn't have that diagnosis. I didn't have that information about the way my emotional and mental landscape was operating. And so I felt like I should be able to feel like that all the time. That feeling is like what I want all the time.

and again that's not sustainable or realistic but I was always chasing after that kind of that kind of magic I suppose and then I remember a therapist saying to me when I was really depressed she was like well what happened before you got really depressed and I was like well I felt incredible everything was amazing I was on top of the world

and she said it's like you float up into the sky when you're that happy and so when you get knocked back down you fall even further. And there was a very, yeah, I'd say very kind of ungrounded, unruited nature to how I moved through the world, I suppose. Yes. You knew that these moments of rapture were available

and that sense of wanting to make them consistent. Yes. And the fact that they weren't consistent was somehow your fault. Yes, yes. So you're now filming Detroit, you have this ret traumatizing, really, experience of filming this scene again and again and again. and someone recommends a Reiki healer, you go along and you have a great experience.

Oh, the best. I mean, I thought it was in a life that had been filled with a lot of really great experiences. I would have, I left that thinking this is the best thing I've ever experienced and this is the best day of my life. And I just wanted more and more of that feeling, which was a very literal kind of magical, invisible force moving my body like a thing that I still can't quite comprehend

how that could have felt so real and I remember thinking as I was experiencing it like this is so amazing why have I ever taken drugs? This is so much better and I just thought this is it this is the magic solution this is the silver bullet this is the thing that will fix me forever and now I will be able to be happy

always and there were further courses to take and there were more healings to get And there was a wonderful kind of ever-expanding path that I could follow through the organisation this healer was part of. And so I started following very diligently the sort of the path and the instructions and took another course and then took another course. And then everything fell apart. And you were taking these courses back in the UK in London. Yeah. And you were paying for them.

I was paying for them, yes. and the price increased kind of each level you progressed through. It got more expensive. Will you describe one of those courses? Yeah, so the first one I took was two days. It was in a basement room in a hotel, but a very beautiful basement room that was all blue, like blue carpet, blue, wallpaper, blue chairs,

and everything was kind of immersed in this very calm, gorgeous colour. We meditated a lot. That was a big part of it. And I had been doing some meditation on my own or sort of through like guided, like, you know, like meditation tracks and things like that. And I'd done a course in transcendental meditation. So I was kind of, I was like, oh, I know what meditation is like. And this was something else. It was like these deep kind of visionary journeys that took me into these.

I saw fabulous things in my head. I meditated in a way I never could have imagined was really possible. You know, I think we'd meditate for sort of like that for sort of 45 minutes to an hour and you'd come out of it feeling like a completely altered person. And then we were also learning rituals, which we were supposed to perform twice a day, every day, which I did very diligently after I took that course. And then there was also information about the world and the universe and, uh, Fun facts like dragons and unicorns are real and didn't you know that they are.

And I remember kind of having a certain degree of skepticism about some of it. But it just felt so incredible. It just felt so good. And I thought, well, maybe. I mean, I can sort of like, I think I thought I could sort of take what I needed from it and maybe figure out the other stuff I wasn't sure about later. And then just got kind of deeper and deeper and more and more. immersed. Looking back on it now and we're going to come on to what happened and how harmful it

was for you. Looking back on it now, do you think it was cult-like? Yes, I think so. I think I'm very wary of that word in that I think you know when people say in a film if you take your top off you have to be very careful what you say for like three minutes afterwards because no one's going to be listening to you they're just going to be looking at your tits I did not know that that's really interesting

if you're going to do a topless scene no one will hear anything that comes out of your mouth kind of thing and I slightly think that C word can be similarly distracting in that I think it

carries such weight and such power and I feel like it slightly erase nuance. I chose to call them the organization in the book. And that feels better to me to use that term because it allows for gray areas, I suppose. And I still can see why I was so seduced by it, I suppose. There was a time when I really judged myself for falling for it,

for want of a better word. And now I'm like, no, you thought it was wonderful. It felt wonderful. Of course you were like all in. It felt like everything I'd ever wanted was suddenly being handed to me. I can totally understand, by the way. And that's a testament to the quality of your writing and your explanation of it. There were some great things that came out of it.

Meditating for 45 minutes is probably a great thing. Not that I've ever done it, but it's a great thing to do right here. And then I can understand how the allure of that and that feeling and the connections you're making and the community you're forming with the other people leads you somewhere where suddenly you've got a wand and you're chanting and you're believing in dragons and unicorns. Yeah. It makes complete sense.

I'm glad it makes sense. It does. That was the big thing I wanted this book to be able to do was make sense of it both for myself and then also for people that read it that people could see why I took the steps that I did. And as you said earlier, I think that it is incremental that each decision along the way

doesn't seem that major and definitely doesn't seem like it's going to take you where I ended up. There is a character in the book called Steve who is the most senior person in this organisation. Yes. And you develop a fixation on him, would that be fair to say, which he encourages?

Yes, it's very intense fixation. There was the kind of incremental thing and then there were certain moments where it was like a huge, huge leap in my devotion and belief. And meeting him, which happened when, so I took this two-day course, then about five or six months later, I took a week-long course. And on the penultimate day of that course, I met Steve, he came to give a talk to the students. and then it was like a whole different ballgame

because I already believed that magic was real and then I met him and I was like oh this is what someone who is a magician is like and I still it's weird to think about that those that encounter with him because it was so it always it almost sounds cliche it was hard to write about without it sounds like overblown, because I just was like, I've never met anyone this confident or this magnetic

in my entire life. And that was the first time. And this is in the book that I thought, oh, maybe this is a cult because I thought they have charismatic leaders. This man is incredibly charismatic. He's surrounded by all these women. He was something else. And I definitely developed very quickly a kind of intense, yeah, fixation or obsession with him. really wanted his approval, his attention, and then quite quickly decided I was completely in love with him and we must be soulmates. Before we get on to your second, quote unquote, failure, I wonder if you could talk to me a bit about your 20s more broadly, because I wonder if part of you was also looking for a community of like-minded people because you were already separate from your peers, because of the people. because of the life that you were living and the acting jobs that you got

since you were a teenager, was it difficult sometimes to connect with your contemporaries? Yes, it was. I mean, I think I have some really close friends from university who are still my friends and I have really good friends from the acting world. But a lot of friends you make in film and TV can be quite fleeting, transitory friendships.

And so I think that sense of. of community was something I was struggling to find. And then I think also, yeah, there was a way in which my life was very unusual to a lot of my friends from university who would like doctors and lawyers and management consultants and various differently and worked in marketing and whatever. And they would kind of be quite baffled by my life. And I was often, I was unemployed for long periods of time. kind of waiting for the next job.

And I think they found that very hard to wrap their head around. And they was kind of like, be like, well, what do you do? I don't understand. What do you do all day? And I was like, I don't really know. There's that interesting feeling that happened to me very much when I got the part in skins. Of you have been chosen and you are special and that we have seen something in you that means we are picking you over everyone else.

And that's an incredible feeling. But it can also be kind of isolating. It's exciting to be special and chosen And it's isolating to be special and chosen And then also you want to keep being chosen And then a lot of the time you're not And so it was again I mean the highs and lows I was experiencing anyway

In terms of my mental health In terms of my kind of search for happiness I think was definitely exacerbated By working in that industry Which is all highs and lows all the time Fascinating this sense of specialness being attractive but also crushing that you had the specialness of being the child that your mother so desperately wanted the specialness of getting that part and skins the

specialness of a Cambridge interview allotting you the position of chosen one to study that degree yeah and and now in this wellness organisation the specialness you hope are being chosen by steed yes so can i just ask you final question on this yeah About addiction. Yes. You mentioned earlier that you liked to party. I did. Yes.

Do you feel in some respects that the wellness experiences you were having, and I put that in quotation marks because it's not real wellness? Yeah. But would they a substitute for the partying and the drugs? Yeah. I mean, a thousand percent. You know, I had a very addictive relationship with various substances, with, you know, alcohol, cigarettes, recreational drugs.

and then and I sometimes was like that's fine that's just who I am and I'm in my 20s and loads of my friends do all the same things and sometimes I was like desperate to give those things up and I just found the meditation, spirituality and then particularly this organisation was something else to get addicted to. Yes.

I thought it was a healthy addiction. You know, I thought it could only bring good things into my life. But I think it was exactly the same kind of piece of me that was being activated that just wanted kind of more and more and more of a rush of a high, of a good feeling that was kind of made me very vulnerable to that. I often find myself late at night scrolling after a long day when I suddenly spot something I need. I had to check out and then I realized I can't remember the login. let alone which password I used.

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Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. This search for that high leads us on to the second thing that we're going to talk about, which is being sectioned. Yes. Do you mind describing, as you did in the book, the breakdown that you had in the cubicle in the hotel? I can try. I can try and give a, yeah, a reasonably short account of that. So I, on the final day of the course, there was going to, we were all going to be initiated at the sort of next level of the organisation's structure.

and we were sort of getting ready for that and we were performing these healings on each other and I just, something was starting to really, really not be right in my head and I was hearing voices. I had this kind of darkness closing in at the corners of my vision. I was really struggling to kind of feel present.

And because of the context, it all felt, you know, like kind of a magical, spiritual experience, but it was very, very scary. And I ended up going to the toilets in this basement of this hotel, I think just to kind of get away from other people and kind of have a moment. And then I didn't leave the cubicle for many hours. My sense of time was really not clear by that point. And I thought while I was in the cubicle that I was giving, basically kind of like giving birth out of the top of my skull.

And I thought I was giving birth to a sort of new universe that would be completely a sort of paradise utopia. Various people tried to kind of talk to me through the door. And then I asked for Steve to come and talk to me. And he did. He persuaded me to come out of the cubicle. and then him and the teachers from the course performed an exorcism on me, which at the time I remember thinking was really hilarious. And I couldn't quite, there were lots of layers to my understanding.

It's quite a difficult story to tell because of the state I was in. But I kind of thought, oh, you know, me and Steve are soulmates. We've saved the world. No one else can know. And so he has to pretend that I've been possessed and they're going to perform the exorcism. to kind of cover up what's really happening. And then some paramedics came and took me to hospital, but I thought I was being taken to a palace where Steve was awaiting me

and we would get married and become kind of, you know, king and queen of this new utopia. Now, when I look at it, that doesn't add up, but it felt so utterly real to me in those moments. When was your first understanding of the fact that you had been sectioned? There was a moment where I remember being told I was being sectioned. And I was in a place that looked like a hospital, smelled like a hospital. Everyone had NHS lanyards around their neck.

I could kind of get these pieces of information. But it was all in a, I used all that information to support my own. narrative. And so when they said, when the word sectioned was used, I just remember kind of thinking, that doesn't really make sense. That doesn't really fit in with what I understand is going on. So it's sort of, I sort of put it to one side. I was in hospital for three weeks, and I'd say maybe, maybe about a week in, I kind of understood, oh, I'm actually in a psychiatric ward and I can't leave. But it wasn't until months later, really,

that those delusions finally left me. It was just there was an understanding of this is the reality. I don't understand why this is happening, but this must well be part of the plan to save the universe and for me to end up with Steve, if that makes sense. It does. You were 27?

I was 27. Yes. Were you scared? There were moments of these experiences that were absolutely terrifying. And there were moments of these experiences that were the most euphoric I have ever been in my entire life. It's hard to describe to people how good it felt to feel that euphoric, that powerful, that purposeful, that kind of destined. What was your experience of medication during these three weeks? weeks? So I was very resistant to it early on. In the first few days, I think there was a lot of

spitting out pills and thinking people were trying to poison me. And I think I was probably quite heavily sedated at various points, but my memories are quite fragmented around that time. One day, and I don't know why, there was a voice in my head, which I thought was Steve's voice, which told me, it's fine, you can take the pills, it's safe to take the pills. And so I I started taking them. And so gradually, once I started taking quite a powerful anti-sychotic, did start to regain some connection to reality. But it took a long time, yeah, to fully come back. The reason you told me that you have chosen to talk about this, or part of the reason,

is because you felt so much shame over having. and being sectioned. Yeah. Could you explore that a little bit more with me? Yeah, for sure. When I, you know, was coming to terms of it later, when I was kind of much more back in my sense of reality, it felt like I had sort of failed at being an adult,

failed at being independent, failed at, I guess it felt like the mental health equivalent of going bankrupt or something, if that makes sense. Like this idea that you had sort of, gone the furthest you could go to the most the biggest extreme and you had been told you know you don't you're not functional that we have to we have to take extreme measures because you are so not functional and that was really um really difficult to come to terms with that I had gotten to that place and now I have so much more compassion for myself having gone through that and for and I think I'm really I said at the

beginning. I don't like the word gratitude, but I am I am grateful for that experience because I think I think of myself at 25, 26 and I was so obsessed with my career. I was so obsessed with my body and going to the gym and how I looked in the mirror and who wanted to fuck me or didn't want to fuck me and whether I was smoking five cigarettes a day or 10 cigarettes today. You know, it was like, I felt like all my obsessions were quite trivial and superficial really in my mid-20s. And then this thing happened that completely ripped me open, completely brought me to my knees, and brought me into contact with other people who were having their lives ripped open and being brought to their knees. And I just, I feel like I'm a much more empathetic person because of it and a much more real person because of it.

And I also found like it was interesting when people came to visit me because my, you know, my parents visited me. A lot of friends came to visit me in hospital. And I could see their fear when they arrived usually. And then I could see them over the course of their visit sort of relax and realize the other patients are just people. They would sometimes have conversations with the other patients. There was a kind of like I could see everyone kind of go like. oh, this is not some kind of nightmare community of people that aren't sort of safe to be around. It was just like these are just people going through a really difficult time.

And looking back on that shift that I saw in the people closest to me, their perception, as well as my own perception shifting, I find that quite beautiful, really. I find it staggeringly beautiful. and also because of what you were talking about about being chosen and birthing this utopia in a way perhaps part of your purpose is to have made that so clear that there is so much othering

of things that we can't understand or feel fearful of and actually you've reminded these people of their own humanity and how we all exist on this spectrum yeah that's the power of that's the magic of what you're doing?

Thank you. That's a really lovely perspective on it. And it's something I think about sometimes because the very first healing I was given was I was told it would strip away everything that wasn't authentic to who I was. And I was told it would connect me with my true purpose in life.

And I no longer believe in any of the magic of the organisation or their beliefs, but sometimes I look at what that healing set in motion and where I have any. ended up now because of it. And I think, well, maybe it did connect me with a purpose. And maybe it did strip away things that were not really authentic to who I was meant to be. The other ring is interesting as well because we live in a culture. I mean, here we are on my podcast, I'm fair which talks, which has a lot of sort of therapy adjacent language to it. And how great that we can live in a

culture where we are encouraged to talk about anxiety and things like that. However, I do think that if there is a negative to the overwhelm of that conversation, it is that things that exist on a more extreme end of the spectrum get overlooked, othered and underfunded. Yeah. And I just wondered what your take was on that, on the kind of mental health language that is so current right now. And in some instances, quite adjacent to the wellness industry of it all. Yes. Yes. And like real serious clinical mental health.

issues, whether it be bipolar disorder, living with schizophrenia, the impact that has on families, whether you think there's enough attention and a pay to that? I completely, I think there isn't enough attention put on the more extreme end of the spectrum. I think there has been, if I'm honest, I can get quite angry a lot of the time about this. I hear so much, we all need to talk about mental health more and everyone has mental health problems. and it's okay if you need a mental health day because you're feeling anxious or you're feeling sad. And it's sort of like, okay, but what if I want to talk about

when I was drinking my own urine on a psychiatric ward? And you can't really say that at a dinner party. And I think it's, I just feel like there is still a big taboo around psychosis, bipolar, schizophrenia, other conditions that are less palatable and less kind of cozy and less solved by a hot bath or some mindfulness or some crystals

or whatever your kind of solution or like talking therapies like I had a friend say to me once when I was struggling with a kind of minor manic episode and then going into a depression and he was like well we all have ups and downs we do

but you know I think it's just yeah I just I think there can be an erasure basically of these types of experiences that people still don't want to talk about, still don't want to look at. And again, that are more common than we like to acknowledge, I think, a lot of the time. The 2006 Chevrolet Equinox awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power. It's designed for your everyday. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca.com.

You end up with a diagnosis of bipolar. Yes. And I'm going to do something that you might find embarrassing, but there was just such an extraordinary description of it in your book. Okay. That I would love with your permission to read. Yeah. Okay.

It was easy to mention the bad things first. To talk about times I had been depressed or obviously fucked up. I told him about my drug use, my heavy drinking, my self-harm, the periods of lying in bed for days or weeks at a time, when I'd wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. the stronger desire to actively commit suicide. But there was something else that felt both trickier and more important to describe. It was the sense of magic I had always known, long before the organisation had come into my life.

Moments of euphoria, flashes of something infinite and sublime. I described a time in my teenage years, walking around an art gallery in a state of rapture. Rapture at the paintings, yes. But it was more than that. It was the experience of simply being in a room, every cell in my body, burning with life and every tiny sensation feeling like a miracle. I described how this feeling had appeared sporadically from adolescence onwards, how I had never been able to control how it came and went,

how I had always wanted more, more, more of it, but how it had been punctuated with deep dives into darkness and misery. I told him how my emotional and mental landscape had always been one of extremes. I understood, I think, on some level, that my experiences on the course and in the hospital were an extension of something I had known and felt before, exaggerated and amplified, but not entirely unfamiliar. I think that is one of the best descriptions of something that probably lies beyond words so many people that I've ever read. And so many people are going to feel seen and understood

in those words. And I just want to salute you for it. Thank you. No easy question. Thank you. It's really strange to hear someone else read it out loud. It's quite nice. It's something I think with bipolar, I think the fact that half of it is so seductively wonderful to experience

until it's not. It makes it such a tricky condition to manage because you can feel a bit manic and think, well, this is great. I'm like, I've got all this energy. I'm so creative. I'm getting stuff done. I feel amazing. I can, I'm like talking more and telling all these great stories. I'm so funny. You know, you're like you're firing on all cylinders. And you think, well, just that I just want like 10% more of this. And then you just want another 10% more. And actually, you have to be really careful and cautious of your own positive feelings as much as your negative ones. And I also. had moments in the lead-up to my episode where people were saying to me, you know, what's your secret? Like, you seem so well. And I was like, yeah, no, I'm meditating and everything's amazing. And it's harder to know when someone's in a danger zone if it looks like joy and it looks

like energy and it looks like productivity as well. I remember talking to a psychiatrist once and saying and referring to mania as the good side of bipolar. And he was like, they're not, there's no good, like it's not, they're equally dangerous. And in fact, mania is probably more dangerous. And it took me a long time to kind of acknowledge that that was true, that the mania wasn't this kind of superpower. And if only I could get rid of the depression, then everything would be amazing. That they're equally destructive and damaging.

That's really hard to describe and really hard to understand, maybe unless you've experienced it. Yeah. Like there's a sadness for me about not always being able to trust in one's own happiness, which I think I'm getting better now, also at distinguishing the difference between happiness and mania, but for a long time I, I think I had only really experienced happiness when I was manic. So I have to now kind of be like, are you happy because something good has happened? Or are you just randomly ecstatically happy? That must be so difficult. And I wonder as well, I mean, maybe this is a really sort of trite question. But do you or did you worry that those moments of mania or rapture were wrapped up in your creativity?

I did. Yeah. I did. And I think, I mean, I, so I want to be very clear that I take medication now and I'm very, and I plan to take it for the rest of my life. and I understand that a lot of people don't feel that way and they're very keen to come off medication. And I do think there can be a little bit of an over glamorization of the relationship between mania and creativity. And I'd like it to be clear that I wrote most of this book while on medication. What I've actually found is that the more stable I am, the better creative work I can do.

But it's very appealing to do it all in a rush and stay up all night and write thousands of words. But you can't really turn that into anything real, I don't think. But I think it's quite a dangerous road to go down if you think your creativity is entirely rooted in your mental health being quite unstable. Yes. Your final failure is giving up acting.

Yeah. So was this all related to your experience being section of the diagnosis? Do you think it came after that? It came after it, but it was definitely related to it. There's lots of different factors that led me to walk away from acting. My life was very difficult to rebuild in the aftermath of what had happened to me. And I was also, I mean, from being that high, the crash down into depression was so extreme and so severe. And I mean, I write in the book about, you know, kind of being on a press tour and being so depressed, I can barely hold my head up.

Like it was really, really hard to get back to work. I think if your job is in any way public facing, I mean, it's hard to do any job when you're depressed, of course. But it was this idea of being visible when I was that sad. and all I wanted to do was hide away. And I couldn't because I had contractual obligations to fulfill. It was really hard to sort of sell myself, I suppose, and sell the projects that I was promoting. And then it was even harder to audition

and try and make myself look like an appealing prospect to work with. And some of the medication I'd been put on had made me gain a lot of weight, which made me feel very self-conscious about being in an industry that has a lot of focus on. what one's body looks like. So I did, Charlie says, after a year to the day,

I flew to L.A. to do that movie after I've been hospitalized, to play Leslie Van Houten, who was a member of the Manson family. And I was really, really scared to play that role, given what had happened with Detroit. I was quite superstitious about it.

And I felt like I wanted to hold something of myself back. Whereas when I had done acting jobs before, I was willing to give everything. Yeah. There was a, yeah, like a reckless giving of the self to everything. And I didn't care if I came home from set covered in bruises. I didn't care if I, you know, if I was using very dark memories to, I didn't, I was willing to just give everything to it, throw everything at it. And Aunt Charlie says I was a bit more wary of doing that.

And I don't know if this sounds strange, but it was much less interesting that way. It wasn't fun probably isn't the right word, but it wasn't fulfilling to me in the same way when I thought. And there were lots of actors who are very sensible and bounderied and do incredible work, but I guess I didn't know how to be one of them. I'd moved to L.A. and it's quite hard to be, it's a very very, very industry-dominated town. And I just had, you know, about a year of kind of really, really depressing auditions, which I didn't really want to get even.

I used to always be, like, flawless at remembering lines. I was, like, forgetting lines and auditions, doing really bad auditions over and over again. And I just hated every second of it. And it didn't feel, it didn't feel fun anymore. It didn't feel creative anymore. it didn't feel good anymore. But I had this real feeling of like, well, everyone wants this. This is like such a desirable job.

You can't walk away from that. And it took a long time to acknowledge that it was making me really unhappy. And I probably should at least take a break. And so in, I think it was in 2019 after the final series of Game of Thrones had come out and I'd done the press tour for that. And then Charlie Says came out and I did a press stuff for that. And I was really exhausted. And I said, I'm going to take a break.

And my team said, okay, yeah, you know, even if you wanted to take like three or four months, we would be okay with that. And I remember thinking three or four months doesn't sound that long, given how I was feeling. And that break has never stopped there, basically. That was it. But I had to frame it, I think, as a break rather than I'm done. Yeah. Because it felt really scary to say, because I'd only ever been an actor as an, I started

when I was still at school. So that was my entire identity, particularly as an adult, was wrapped up in that. And it had been my dream as a child and I'd got my wish and all these things. And so felt, I mean, I remember having, again, like therapy sessions where I just cried for the whole hour about what my future could. could possibly look like. And the thing I find really interesting now is that when I was acting, I never really thought of my career as very successful. I was always, because I always wanted more, and I was wanted the next thing and bigger jobs and more challenging roles. And so I always

would have told you in my 20s that, oh, you know, I'm doing terribly. Like, everything's awful and I haven't worked in months or whatever. And now I look back on my body of work. It was really amazing. Like I'm really proud of it and I'm really proud of that chapter of my life. And I can just see it with much more perspective of like you did really incredible things. You did great work. And I wish I'd been able to appreciate that more at the time instead of always been focusing on bigger, better, more, you know. But you have found something that feels much more aligned with your authentic self. It does. Yes. And are you going to write more books? Is this what you're going to do now? Oh, 100. That's the plan. If I can manage it, I want to write loads and loads more books.

Well, we want loads more Hannah Murray books. Okay, great. I think you're an amazing, talented writer. Thank you. Do you want to write novels as well? Yeah. Okay, just checking. And there are so many thanks I want to give you and so many things I'm grateful for, but I'm not going to say gratitude.

Why do you dislike the word gratitude? I think it's, well, Pali is just really overused. I feel, I think it's just a bit, it's a bit like hashtag blessed, kind of corny, kind of, maybe thankful is a better word, I don't know. Yeah, it's probably, it's become associated with journals, hasn't it? It has. It has. Yes, yes. I suppose I'd like to draw this as a close because we have spoken about your experience of this particular organisation.

And I wonder if someone's listening to this thinking, oh, well, I like exploring Reiki and meditation and various sort of spiritual. things. What would you say to them? Would you sound a note of caution or would you just ask someone to ask more questions? Or what do you think of sort of wellness in aggregate? Yeah, it's difficult. I definitely don't want to kind of preach from a high horse and say everything associated with wellness in the spiritual world is bad or evil or you should stay away from all of it. I personally want to stay away from all of it for myself. For me, it's a world and also an industry. It's a very, very lucrative industry, a lot of this. stuff. From my perspective doesn't critique itself very much. I see this this idea that everything

associated with meditation is positive. Everything associated with wellness is positive. Everything spiritual is good. And I just, I would just, yeah, I would just encourage a certain level of skepticism, a level of what am I getting out of this? Am I connected with what I really want or am I following someone else's advice on how to live my life? I just think it should be approached with a degree

of caution because I think at the moment people are kind of being flooded with a lot of this stuff. It's this whole umbrella. It was a personal trainer who recommended the healer to me. And I don't think she really had any idea what she was, what organization she was ultimately referring me to. She just kind of thought, oh yeah, it's great. Reiki's great.

Like, it's all wellness. It's all good. And I wish I hadn't spent so much time letting other people tell me what was good for me, I guess. And I think it would be nice if we could all trust ourselves a bit more. Trust our instincts. Trust our instincts, yeah. Hannah Murray, thank you so much for coming on how to fail. and I want everyone to go out and buy your book The Make Believe

because we've talked about a lot today but there's so much more in the book and I just know that any reader will get an enormous amount from it and I can't thank you enough for sharing your experience and for coming on how to fail. Thank you so much. This has been a really, really wonderful conversation to have. Thank you so much for listening and watching.

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