Skins’ Hannah Murray on the cult that cost her thousands of pounds – and her sanity

About a year after she was sectioned, Hannah Murray went to Venice Film Festival to promote what would turn out to be her last film, Charlie Says. In it, she played Leslie Van Houten, one of the many female followers of cult leader Charles Manson. “And the question almost every journalist asked,” recalls the 36-year-old now, “was, ‘How can you possibly empathise with these women?’ Part of me wanted to scream, ‘Because I really understand this intimately.’ But I wasn’t ready, at all, to share that story.”

Now, she is. Murray’s new memoir, The Make-Believe, is startling, honest and deeply moving. It tells of how during a period of mental instability, a session with an “energy healer” led Murray deeper and deeper into a wellness cult. How it culminated in a psychotic break and forced hospitalisation, during which she was convinced she was the messiah. And how the cult’s leader, the only man at the top of a pyramid of female “healers”, encouraged her delusions, told her that she had been possessed by the devil and that he could talk to her inside her mind. It is one of the clearest accounts I’ve ever read of how someone can become incrementally brainwashed. 

“Something big happened to me, but I didn’t think I would ever want to tell it publicly,” says Murray now. “So I thought, I have all these memories, I’ll write them all out, and then I can turn it into a film or something. And then I read it back, and thought, ‘Oh shit, this is a memoir.’”

We’re in a restaurant in London’s Liverpool Street. Murray is dressed down in a sweatshirt, jeans, no makeup, pushing her brown hair from one side to the other as she talks. If you walked past her in the street, you probably wouldn’t pick her out as the woman who played the guileless Gilly in Game of Thrones, or the anorexic teen Cassie in Skins. She hasn’t acted in years now, which means no more red carpet anxiety, no more gruelling personal trainers, no more pressure to look a certain way. “It’s really nice,” she says, “to no longer feel like my job depends on my dress size”.

For a long time, Murray felt almost as though her life depended on her dress size. She was just 17 when she was cast as Cassie, and didn’t need to lose weight for the role because she was already skipping meals. When Skins became a hit, Murray became a source of “thinspiration” for anorexic people online. As she matured, her body developed and changed, and “I was unable to stand it”.

Thus began a decade of restrictive eating (she tried being vegan, then low-carb, then paleo), of nutritionists who encouraged her to meticulously monitor her calorie intake, and of personal trainers. “I used to look in the mirror,” Murray tells me, “and if I didn’t like what I saw, it was like, ‘That means I’m not gonna get a role.’ My professional success and my personal appearance felt so intertwined, and I put a huge amount of pressure on myself to look a certain way. I feel like I wasted a lot of time doing that. I spent so much time and so much money on fitness and wellness and all that stuff. And I just think, maybe I could have been doing more interesting things. I feel a kind of sadness about that sometimes.”

I don’t know how any actress copes with the pressure to look a certain way, I tell Murray. It’s hard enough for women who aren’t in the spotlight. “I don’t quite know how I did,” she says with a shake of the head. “I know it caused me a lot of deep sadness and deep self-loathing, because I felt like I wasn’t good enough a lot of the time. And I used to read things people said online about my body or my face – that it wasn’t… that they didn’t like it.” She laughs weakly. “And I used to be so invested in that.”

It was one of her personal trainers who, inadvertently, set Murray on the path towards the cult. She was in Boston, shooting a Kathryn Bigelow film called Detroit, and she was struggling. Not only was she in the midst of a depression – it would be another few years before the bipolar diagnosis that would explain so much – but the trauma of filming a violent sexual assault scene was taking its toll. Her dress would be ripped from her body take after take after take, and then she would go back to her hotel room and vomit. “My body just couldn’t cope with it,” she tells me.

And yet, she had been conditioned to think that suffering was a virtue. “Because I started so young, I [thought that] to be a serious actor was to be really tortured.” By this point she had already depicted three suicide attempts on screen. Dark material, she says, was her bread and butter.

“I thought hard work made me a good human,” she continues, “and sometimes the hard work was evidenced in bruises on my body, or nightmares that I couldn’t deal with.” But she was reaching breaking point. So her personal trainer sent her to see an energy healer called “Grace” (the names in the book have all been changed; she doesn’t name the cult either).

While Grace withheld any information about herself, Murray found herself spilling her own deepest secrets – how her mother had five miscarriages before she was born, which meant she felt she had to live for not just herself but her five “ghost siblings”; how she drank too much, did too many drugs, had a history of self-harming, cheated on partners, had a difficult relationship with her parents. Then Grace told her that she was going to perform a healing, which would bring “Light” into her body, and activate her “spiritual DNA”. 

The way Murray describes that healing, it sounds both ludicrous and miraculous. “Grace is not touching me, I have my eyes closed, and my body starts to move. Perhaps it is more accurate to say my body started to be moved. By an invisible force. It takes my breath away […] I can feel it. It feels like magic.”

“I do remember just how real it felt,” says Murray now. I get the sense that a small part of her still believes it was real. “I wasn’t encouraged to think I would feel an invisible force – it came out of nowhere,” she says. “So I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.” It was important for her to describe the many positive experiences she had in the cult, she says, “because otherwise, why would you understand why I stayed in for so long?”

The session cost £150. The next, back in London, was £700. In that one, she was told that every member of the organisation had one soulmate, whose soul would join with hers after death to create one “Creator God”. Next there was a psychic night, then a class in astral projection, where the aim is for your consciousness to leave your body and explore other dimensions (it didn’t work – but the teacher insisted that it had). The organisation was clever – the descent from kooky wellness classes to full-on cult was gradual. By the time she was told that the primary goal of the organisation was to bring a form of utopia to the world in which humans, mermaids, elves and faeries would live in harmony with each other, she was in too deep to listen to the nagging doubts.

She did, occasionally, experience what she calls a “spiritual whiplash” – a moment where she suddenly looked around and wondered how on Earth she had got herself so deep. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘How am I here?’” she recalls. “‘This is so strange… but great! And like, everything has been going really well!’ It was small steps, and then sudden big leaps.”

The biggest leap was the week-long course in healing, a step on the road to the ultimate goal: to become a ritual master. Not that she really knew what a ritual master was. “People were really cryptic and really secretive about it,” she says. “And the only thing that really seemed clear to me was that it was a terrifyingly serious commitment. Once you start that process, you’re in, and you’re just going up and up and up, and it just gets more expensive and more restrictions on your life and the time commitment and the energy commitment…” 

The course cost £2,444. No one – no family, no friends – knew she was taking it. She booked herself into a hotel, stopped replying to messages and disappeared down the rabbit hole.

On day one, when she and her course mates arrived in the “temple space” (a hotel conference room), they learned various rituals – locating people’s 16 invisible energy points and using them to heal them; locating crown caps, which come over the crown chakra and block the “Light”. On the third day, they received their wands – thick pieces of dark wood with a clear quartz crystal on one end – and were told they were on the path to becoming magicians. By this point, having barely slept and not interacted with anyone but other cult members, Murray was becoming increasingly deluded.

She was also addicted. “The mechanism within me that was addicted to nicotine, that was addicted to alcohol, it just latched on to something new,” she says. “And it was like, ‘Great, I can be addicted to this instead, and this is healthy, and this is good for me.’ It just lit up the same place in my brain.”

It was the day before her psychotic break that she met “Steve”, the head of the cult. It was only when he introduced himself with a joke about sex that she registered that all the people leading her classes until now had been women. “I didn’t notice it until I suddenly really noticed it,” she says. “It was a very floaty, traditionally feminine, soft demeanour that’s associated with wellness culture. And then this man walks in, and he’s so macho, and immediately is talking about sex and he’s so confident. It was jarring. And I wonder if the jarring quality of it is deliberate, to make you pay more attention to him.”

She quickly latched onto Steve. Within minutes of meeting him, she became convinced that she needed to have sex with him. “I wanted to f**k Steve, more than I had ever wanted to f**k anyone,” she writes. Later that evening, back at the hotel, she began to hear Steve’s voice in her head, telling her that they were going to be married, that their union would bring paradise to Earth. 

The next morning, the final day of the course, is a blur. In the memoir, she describes it in fragmented, staccato sentences. She recalls locking herself in a toilet cubicle, and then an exorcism being performed on her by the cult leaders, and then being pinned to the ground by paramedics and taken to hospital.

“The room is empty. The room is waiting for me. I have not yet arrived in the room,” she writes. All she could think about was Steve. “He is a magician. He is my King. My God. God the father. He is my father. And he is my great, great, great, great love.”

Locked in the psychiatric ward, convinced that she was Jesus and had died and been reborn, Murray refused to eat. She would only drink tea from a cup, then wee in the cup and drink that too. “I am a ritual master,” she writes. “And this, drinking my own urine, is a powerful ritual. This is all I need now to survive.” 

As soon as she got her phone back, she started texting Steve. He told her that while she was filming Detroit, a “bad guy got inside” of her. “I stood with you and fought it and we got rid of it, but it left damage,” he said. “In simple terms you got possessed.” He recommended more healing work – which would, of course, mean paying him more money. Murray told him that she had been hearing his voice inside her head, and asked if it was real. “Well, that’s a high-level connection and that’s part of what I had to do so I could talk directly to your soul and help you,” he confirmed. 

These messages are verbatim, Murray tells me. She finds them hard to look at now, “both [because of] my own vulnerability in how I offered him so much of myself, and then also his response. There’s not a lot of anger that lives in me towards anyone really in the story, but if I read those messages, I am quite disgusted.”

You might think – like I did when I was reading the book – that the hospital stint would have been the end of Murray’s involvement with the cult. Not so. “I did not enter ill and leave well,” she writes in the memoir. “I entered extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so.”

After she was discharged, still convinced that the doctors were wrong about her psychotic break and that the cult was the answer, she signed herself up to “wicker training” and “beauty secrets”. “Some people might really question: after you ended up in hospital from doing one of these courses, why on Earth would you have gone back to do more?” she says. “The fact that I took further courses afterwards does seem quite shocking. And to me now, it seems shocking. But I just wanted to believe in it so desperately.”

Her recovery, then, was not a sudden lightbulb moment but a gradual falling away of the scales from her eyes. The courses became less convincing, harder to buy into, more objectionable. There was a particularly silly session involving a small wooden flute. “I started thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t actually all this cracked up to be,’” she explains.

When a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, things suddenly made sense. “There was a kind of immediate relief,” she writes in the book. “This could provide an explanation for many years of challenge, mental anguish, pain, confusion.”

However gradual and non-linear her recovery was, she is just relieved that it happened. “What on Earth would have happened if I’d gone further?” she says, shaking her head. “And what would my life have become, and where would I be now? I’m just really glad that I didn’t.”

She steers clear of anything to do with wellness these days, and takes immense issue with a lot of it. “My experience is an example of wellness culture making you deeply unwell,” she says. “There’s this idea that anything under that umbrella is a panacea that will solve all your problems. Just do more meditation, or more yoga, or get more crystals. And so I just would encourage people to think: what’s motivating me to do more of this? Is it because I genuinely love it, or is it because I’m being told that I need to do more of it to make myself a better person?”

Besides, she adds, “why do we always have to be optimising ourselves into perfect bodies, perfect minds, perfect souls? I thought at the time, ‘This is the solution to all the things that are flawed about me,’ and now I think, ‘Well, maybe it’s OK to have a bunch of flaws. I shouldn’t have been trying to solve them or fix them or heal them all the time.”

She doesn’t, however, feel entirely negatively about her experience with the cult. It is a complicated thing – not a neat narrative of good and evil. “A lot of it felt wonderful,” she admits. “I can’t put it in a box and go like, ‘I went through this horrific thing.’ No, I went through a really strange experience that had incredible highs to it and incredible lows to it. It was terrifying and glorious at the same time.”

‘The Make-Believe’ is published by Cornerstone, £18.99