Hannah Murray: Passage Reading — The Make-Believe

Yeah, so this is from the first chapter of the book I'm gonna read from, and it's when I was on set of Detroit.

"Making the movie was a beautiful experience, but the material we were working on was serious, violent, and dark.

I was no stranger to dark content in my acting career.

It seemed, for the most part, to be my bread and butter.

My first professional role had been the anorexic Cassie in the teen drama Skins, and I was currently best known as Gilly in Game of Thrones, a young woman who had had her father's baby.

In the decade I had been working professionally as an actor, I had depicted three suicide attempts on screen.

The first, in Skins, was an overdose, which required me to swallow over 100 Tic Tacs, later vomiting up a sweet, minty liquid in my trailer.

The second saw me dragged from a blood-filled bathtub with slit wrists in an ITV drama.

The third had me hanging from a tree in a Danish independent film, for which I wore a harness that caused excruciating pain and left angry red welts under my armpits.

I was used to crying in scenes, though I still didn't feel I was very good at it, but I knew how to access pain, how to explore and perhaps exploit my own traumas on screen and on stage.

I liked roles that were tough to play, both physically and emotionally.

I liked enduring for my art.

Detroit certainly required endurance.

The days on set were grueling.

I say days, but we were almost exclusively shooting at night.

In scenes, I was grabbed and manhandled and thrown up against walls, and after a week or so, my arms were covered in a tapestry of blue and purple bruises.

I refused to acknowledge these bruises as anything other than a privilege.

I was determined not to be precious and actress-y about it, particularly when I was getting paid to play pretend under the supervision of an excellent stunt team, in the same room as a woman who had experienced the events we were depicting as one of the most traumatic nights of her life.

I was determined to be grateful for the incredible opportunity, and I was.

I was absolutely happy about everything.

I was having the most wonderful time, until we shot the scene in which my dress was ripped from my body.

This was one of the biggest moments for my character and was a moment Kathryn had made me aware of during the audition process, apologizing for the fact the role required some nudity, but saying it was important to tell the story of this incident of sexual assau-