Larry Birkhead Details "Cult-Like" Dynamic With Anna Nicole Smith
Hannah Murray is reflecting on a dark chapter in her life.
Six years after the Game of Thrones actress left Hollywood, she detailed how her brief time in an alleged wellness cult run by a man referred to as Steve led to her involuntary stay in a psychiatric ward.
“I was introduced to Steve and his organization, and I discovered that magic was real,” Murray wrote in an excerpt for her book The Make Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness shared with The Cut June 22. “After my time with them, I had never felt so powerful or alive.”
Murray—who portrayed Gilly in GoT—recounted that when she was just “hours away” from her initiation ceremony into the alleged cult, which she also referred to as an “organization,” she was unexpectedly rushed to the hospital.
“Even after I was told I was being involuntarily committed, I was not concerned,” Murray recalled. “Steve told me I had been possessed by a demon."
Indeed, Murray noted that the organization leader claimed he “performed an exorcism” on her while filming Kathryn Bigelow's 2017 movie Detroit.
Despite her spiraling mental state, the Skins actress noted that at the time, “I was concerned only with the energy I could feel spiraling up through my body.”
Amid her hospital stay, Murray noted that she sent several texts to Steve, which varied from combative messages attempting to figure out what happened to her and accusing him of being an “evil cult leader” to expressions of gratitude.
She recalled that when accusing Steve of wrongdoing, he sent her a text denying her nefarious claims.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO
“‘If I run an evil cult I am the worst cult leader in history,’” Murray alleged Steve wrote in one text to her. “‘I don’t have a compound to put people in. I don’t control people’s sleep or eating patterns. And I tell people to get their own life in order instead of being people’s ‘guru.’’”
And at the time, Murray was convinced.
“I had been completely taken in by everything he said,” she wrote. “I believed him. I believed he was not a cult leader. I believed everything he told me.”
While she later received a bipolar disorder diagnosis, Murray admitted she was not out of the words following her stay at the hospital.
“I did not enter ill and leave well,” she wrote. “I entered extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so.”
Still seeking initiation into Steve’s organization at the time, Murray added, “I had walked out of the ward and straight back into the life that had put me in there.”
Years later, Murray hopes sharing her experience can help prevent others falling prey to the same situation.
“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,” Murray told The Guardian last month. “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.
As she put it, “It’s important to understand why people do these things, rather than going, ‘Oh, they must be idiots.’ Or, ‘How stupid could you be?’”
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