There is a particular cruelty to the wellness industry: it targets people who are already broken, sells them the promise of wholeness, and leaves them worse than it found them. Hannah Murray knows this firsthand. The British actress, who spent her twenties oscillating between the set of Game of Thrones and the quieter anxieties of her own unravelling mind, has written a memoir that is as much an indictment of an exploitative organisation as it is a reckoning with the entertainment industry’s role in making young performers susceptible to precisely this kind of predation.
The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, published by Hutchinson Heinemann on 28 May 2026, arrives when cultural warnings about the wellness industry’s darker corners are overdue. Murray, now 36, does not name the organisation she was drawn into – she calls it simply “the organisation” – but the details are damning enough to stand on their own. This is not a celebrity confession designed to sell sympathy. It is a meticulously observed account of how a vulnerable young woman lost nine years to a cult-like structure that drained her financially, psychologically, and spiritually.
From Bristol to Breakout
Murray grew up in Bristol, the only child of a university professor and a research technician, both at the University of Bristol. A quiet child who spent hours reading, she watched a theatrical production about forest creatures and aliens at eleven and knew she wanted to act.
Her pathway into the profession was unglamorous and oddly methodical. She spent hours studying television, trying to absorb the gestures and rhythms of performers she admired, then joined a youth theatre group. When an open casting for Channel 4’s Skins appeared while she was still at school, she auditioned on a whim. She was cast as Cassie Ainsworth – a delicate, self-destructive teenager with an eating disorder – and became, almost overnight, one of the most recognisable young faces on British television.
The first series was filmed during the summer before her school exams. The second, during exam season itself. Murray frequently missed school but still managed to gain a place at Cambridge University to read English Literature. She later credited her studies with sharpening her ability to read scripts, noting in a 2014 interview with The Herald Scotland that Cambridge taught her to analyse texts “in incredibly close detail,” a skill she said made her “very, very good at reading things now.”
The Cost of Playing Broken Characters
By the time Skins concluded its second series, Murray’s trajectory seemed fixed. She appeared in Dark Shadows for Tim Burton, won the Tribeca Film Festival Best Actress Award for Bridgend (2015), and took home a Sundance Special Jury Prize for Stuart Murdoch’s God Help the Girl (2014). Then came Game of Thrones, in which she played Gilly across five seasons, earning three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations alongside the ensemble cast.
But the roles that brought Murray acclaim exacted a steep toll. The character of Cassie required her to simulate an eating disorder at seventeen; the experience left her fielding accusations online that she was promoting unhealthy body image. On the Skins set, she recounted in her memoir, she once swallowed over a hundred Tic Tacs for a suicide scene and vomited a “sweet minty liquid” in her trailer. On Game of Thrones, she was asked to stare at a tennis ball and imagine it was a giant wolf, day after day, blurring the line between performance and belief in ways she was only beginning to understand.
The most devastating assignment was Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit (2017), about the 1967 Algiers Motel incident. Murray played a character subjected to sexual assault. She described to The Guardian how the scene was reshot repeatedly: “My dress was ripped and my breasts were grabbed and exposed so many times I lost count. Each time my heart was pounding. Each time I felt pain in my stomach and chest. Nerves on fire. I was trembling with adrenaline. I knew it was not real, but it was still a very traumatic experience.”
After filming wrapped, she suffered months of nightmares and night sweats. She tried alcohol, drugs, casual encounters, self-help books, psychoanalysis – nothing worked. Her mental health was deteriorating, and she did not yet know why.
The Healer, the Pyramid, and the Leader Called Steve
In this fragile state, Murray was introduced to an energy healer named Grace through a contact in the acting world. Grace offered a session that cost 150 dollars and left Murray feeling, for the first time in months, genuinely relieved. She slept fourteen hours without nightmares. Grace then directed her towards courses that promised to teach self-healing.
What followed was a descent into an organisation that functioned, by Murray’s account, as a classic pyramid scheme. The structure exploited the very vulnerability it claimed to address. Each course unlocked access to the next, with prices escalating sharply – one class in London cost £700. The practices were an eclectic mix of shamanism, Kabbalah, “magic circles,” salt baths, and lessons on the concept of a “higher self.” Murray, then twenty-seven, was so naive she never searched the organisation online. Had she done so, she would have found warnings about financial manipulation and psychological control.
At the apex of the pyramid stood a man she calls Steve – a grey-bearded figure in a red shirt and yellow jacket, with the mannerisms of a rock star and a tendency towards inappropriate sexual comments. Murray describes their first encounter in her memoir: he embraced her immediately in what he called a “brotherly” hug. She thought the organisation looked like a cult. She continued anyway.
The control, she writes, intensified gradually. Steve eventually mandated that all female followers wear skirts. He made sexual remarks in group settings. The courses grew more elaborate and more expensive, and Murray’s grip on reality began to loosen.
Psychosis, Sectioning, and a Bipolar Diagnosis
The breaking point came after a five-day course designed to “awaken spiritual DNA.” In the days that followed, Murray slept almost not at all. She spoke at extraordinary speed. She saw hidden symbols and signs everywhere. She heard Steve’s voice inside her head. She believed she could fly. She believed she needed to save the world.
After locking herself in a bathroom stall for several hours in a state of acute psychosis, another member of the organisation called an ambulance. Murray was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and spent twenty-eight days in a psychiatric ward. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder.
The diagnosis, she has said, was a relief. “I’d always felt like there was something about my mental landscape, my emotional landscape, that was very challenging,” she told Elizabeth Day on the How To Fail podcast in June 2026. “I didn’t understand why it was so hard and why I had these extreme highs and lows. Having an explanation for that gave me a road map.”
Even after her hospitalisation, the organisation’s leader continued to text her, insisting she had been freed from a demon. Murray says it took considerable time and distance to recognise the manipulation for what it was.
Recovery, Writing, and the Case Against Wellness Culture
Murray has been candid about her recovery. She no longer meditates, avoids crystal shops, and will not do yoga – not because these practices are inherently harmful, but because she cannot predict what they might trigger. As she told The Guardian: “Even the tame stuff can feel quite distressing. I don’t meditate any more. I wouldn’t go into a crystal shop. I don’t do yoga, because I don’t quite know what might come up that might feel a bit too woo-woo for my personal threshold.”
She added a crucial caveat: “But I realise now how pervasive it is. You’ll say, ‘I’m not really sleeping,’ and they’ll say, ‘Have you tried meditation?’ It’s everywhere, seen as an inherently positive solution. But as someone looking for something to fix me entirely, a magic wand or silver bullet, the promise felt seductive and addictive.”
Her return to acting – the role of Leslie Van Houten in Mary Harron’s Charlie Says – proved pivotal. Reading the screenplay, she felt empathy for a young woman manipulated by Charles Manson, and that empathy, she realised, could be extended to herself. “If I can feel that for someone that experienced what she’d experienced and did the things that she did,” she told Waterstones, “maybe I can have more empathy for myself and the decisions that I made.”
Murray now lives in a small town in East England. She has quit drinking, smoking, and drugs. She writes and cooks. She has not acted in several years, and she says, at least once a week, she is glad of it.
The Wellness Industry on Trial
The Make-Believe arrives in a cultural moment saturated with wellness discourse. The global wellness economy was valued at over 5.6 trillion dollars in 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute, and the sector shows no sign of contracting. Murray’s memoir is not the first to expose the destructive potential lurking behind the language of self-care – Bethany Joy Lenz’s Dinner for Vampires (2024), about her years in a cult-like church group, offered a parallel narrative – but it may be the most precise in its dissection of how the wellness pipeline operates.
The book has drawn strong notices. Vogue called it “genuinely jaw-dropping.” The Observer described it as “a compelling mental health memoir about spiritual cults, vulnerability, and fame.” And the Guardian praised its “frank and often darkly funny exploration of the convergence of hedonism with the self-help industry.”
What distinguishes Murray’s account is not merely the luridness of the experience but her insistence on connecting the dots between an industry that profits from making performers feel special, a mental health system that failed to catch her earlier, and a wellness culture that exploits the gaps left behind. She was, by her own admission, conditioned by years of acting to hand over her body and mind to others. The cult merely formalised what the entertainment industry had already begun.
For anyone navigating the increasingly blurred line between genuine self-care and predatory spiritual commerce, Murray’s memoir serves as both a warning and a guide. The magic, it turns out, was always make-believe. The damage was not.
The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (hardback, £18.99). For more on culture and the arts, visit Creativitys.UK.
