Hannah Murray was not being sectioned. She was, in her own mind, the saviour of the planet. The formal words – “Section 2 … the Mental Health Act … 28 days … right to appeal” – jarred with the world she inhabited, a world of magic, energy healing and seven dimensions. She cocked her head and dismissed them. She was the girl with all the gifts, not a patient detained against her will.
That world had begun when a man in a blue NHS uniform opened the door of a hospital room. He was Black, bald and overweight, and wore a blue lanyard. Murray approached him and tried to kiss him. She believed he was Steve, the leader of the wellness organisation that had introduced her to magic, appearing in disguise. He did not let her. It was not Steve.
He brought her a plate of toast and a cup of tea. She added sugar – something she would never have done in her former life – because, she thought, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. She did not eat the toast. She drank the tea. Alone again, she urinated into the cup and drank that too. She was a Ritual Master. Drinking her own urine was a powerful ritual, the most potent of potions. She had become a self-contained, utterly self-sufficient being, surviving on liquids, air and light.
She decided to explore. She left the room and found herself in a corridor lit by pale yellow strip lights, sitting on one of three purple plastic chairs against the wall. Two doors faced her: one to the blue room with a blue sofa and chair she had occupied, the other to an office where a woman shuffled papers and talked on the phone. She was waiting for him – Steve – to appear.
The woman emerged, holding out Murray’s phone – the only remaining artefact from her previous life. There was someone she wanted Murray to speak to.
A mother’s call
When Murray held the phone to her ear, she heard a voice she recognised. It was her mother. “Hannah? Where are you? What’s going on?” The distress in the voice was raw, trembling with pain and anxiety. Murray did not want to hear it. This was a test, she decided, a horrible test that she could pass. They were trying to tempt her back into the human, to lure her into the past. She hung up.
But the phone rang again. The screen lit up with the word “Mum”. “Talk to her,” said the woman. Murray answered. Her mother sounded different now – calmer, even cheerful. She asked again what was happening. Murray told her everything was fine, that she was in a good place. Do not worry, she said. She thought: this is the last time I will ever hear her voice. This is the way I say goodbye.
Then they told her she was being sectioned. Under the Mental Health Act 1983 – the law in England and Wales that permits detention for assessment or treatment when a person’s health or safety is at risk – she was placed on a Section 2 order, which allows detention for up to 28 days with the right to appeal. She was entitled to an Independent Mental Health Advocate (IMHA) who could explain her rights and the process for discharge. But none of that fitted the world of Steve, of Ritual Master, of Shambhala and the invention of magic. She was not concerned. She was concerned only with the energy spiralling up through her body and the voices in her head.
She paced the hospital corridors, delivering what she called the greatest performance of her life – a tearful monologue. A phrase came to her: The Girl with All the Gifts. The 2016 post-apocalyptic horror film starring Gemma Arterton, about a world ravaged by a fungal infection, had been a warning and a prophecy. And because of her, the apocalypse had been averted.
“I am a magician. I am an actress. I am a writer. I have superhuman strength. I can fly. Anything that can be imagined, I can perform it. Every skill and every ability is mine,” she later wrote in her memoir, The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness, which details the 2017 breakdown and her involvement with a wellness organisation she describes as a cult. The book is due to be published on 23 June 2026 by Cornerstone.
The role of saviour required a backstory. Murray, who played Cassie in the television series Skins (2007–2008, 2013) – a role that earned her a Golden Nymph Award nomination and which she has said was emotionally taxing – and later Gilly in Game of Thrones (2012–2019), for which she received multiple Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, believed she had been hidden in plain sight within a cultural phenomenon. She was, she believed, every character – she played every role. The showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, and the director Kathryn Bigelow, who cast her in the 2017 film Detroit as Julie Ann Hysell, were the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Numbers were irrelevant, she thought: three counts as four. They had cast her in the roles that brought about her destiny – the end and the beginning of the world.
She saw herself as the Ur-actress, every performance ever given animated by her energy, her talent, the gestures and facial expressions she was performing in that moment. She had laid the groundwork for a path that started with energy healing and wound through seven dimensions and increasingly magical planes, until one met one’s soulmate. She had walked that path. It had taken 27 years, full of twisting setbacks, challenges and pain. But everyone would have to make their own journey, unique as snowflakes or fingerprints – and she had shown the way.
Murray, who studied English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and whose parents work at the University of Bristol, will appear in conversation with the actor Jessie Cave – known for playing Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter films – at Kings Place in London on 5 June 2026 to discuss The Make-Believe. In the memoir, she writes that she had become the saviour of the planet because of her own actions. The film that gave her the phrase had been a warning, and she had fulfilled it.