Hannah Murray
Hannah Murray is an actor, born 1989.
Two roles bracket Murray's career and they could not be less alike. She was Cassie Ainsworth on Skins from 2007, a teenage character on a teenage show, played with a floating, unnerving lightness that made her the reason a lot of people remember the first two series at all. Then she was Gilly on Game of Thrones from 2012 to 2019, nominated with the rest of the cast for three Screen Actors Guild awards, playing someone with almost no power in a story about nothing but power.
Between and around them she chose harder material than most actors coming off a teen hit would touch. Womb and Chatroom in 2010, then Bridgend in 2015, for which she won the best actress award at Tribeca. The 2014 musical God Help the Girl, which took a special jury prize at Sundance, is not among the credits listed here.
Her specialism was playing fragility that turns out to be load-bearing. Leslie Van Houten in Charlie Says and Julie Ann in Detroit are both parts where the character is being acted upon for most of the running time, and she finds something to play in that rather than waiting for a big scene.
She has since retired from acting. It is a short body of work with a very high hit rate.
Movies (8)
TV (4)
Where to start with Hannah Murray
Skins first, and specifically the first two series, where Cassie is doing something nobody else on British television was doing at the time. Nothing else here gives her that much room.
After that the honest recommendation is the small films rather than the famous one. Bridgend won her the Tribeca best actress prize and is the most demanding thing she has done. Charlie Says puts her inside a story that could easily have been exploitative and she plays it with real restraint. Womb and Chatroom are both odd, chilly and worth the effort.
Game of Thrones is the one that pays the bills in terms of recognition, and Gilly does grow substantially across eight seasons, but the character spends a lot of it reacting. Detroit is the highest-profile film credit and a genuinely hard watch.