Hannah Murray

This is like such a desirable job.

You can't walk away from that.

And it took a long time to acknowledge that it was making me really unhappy and I probably should at least take a break.

And so in, I think it was in 2019 after the final series of Game of Thrones had come out and I'd done the press tour for that.

And then Charlie Says came out and I did a press tour for that.

And I was really exhausted and I said, I'm going to take a break.

And my team said, OK, yeah, you know, even if you wanted to take like three or four months, we would be OK with that.

And I remember thinking three or four months doesn't sound that long, given how I was feeling.

And that break has never stopped.

Basically, that was it.

But I had to frame it, I think, as a break rather than I'm done.

Because it felt really scary to say no.

Because I'd only ever been an actor as an... I started when I was still at school.

So that was my entire identity, particularly as an adult, was wrapped up in that.

And it had been my dream as a child and I'd got my wish and all these things.

And so...

I mean, I remember having, again, like therapy sessions where I just cried for the whole hour about what my future could possibly look like.

And the thing I find really interesting now is that when I was acting, I never really thought of my career as very successful.

Because I always wanted more and I always wanted the next thing and bigger jobs and whatever.

more challenging roles and so I always would have told you in my 20s like oh you know I'm doing terribly like everything's awful and I haven't worked in months or whatever and now I look back on my body of work like it's really amazing like I'm really proud of it and I'm really proud of that chapter of my life and I can just see it with much more perspective of like you did really incredible things you did great work and I wish I'd been able to appreciate that more at the time instead of always been focusing on bigger better more you know