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House of the Dragon actress Olivia Cooke says she had a mental breakdown at 22

House of the Dragon actress Olivia Cooke says she had a mental breakdown at 22

By Web Desk
October 03, 2022
House of the Dragon actress Olivia Cooke says she had a mental breakdown at 22

House of the Dragon actress Olivia Cooke opened up about her mental health during an interview with the Observer.

The actress revealed that she experienced a "full mental breakdown" at age 22.

The 28-year-old said that she struggled with loneliness while filming the A&E series Bates Motel in Canada.

"I’m so grateful for that job, but I had a really tough time on it,” says Cooke, who played Emma Decody on the Hitchcock-inspired drama, which ran from 2013 to 2017. “The way the schedule worked, we all had different storylines, so a lot of my time was spent in this apartment in Vancouver, working once every two weeks.”

By 2016, that sense of isolation had grown into full-fledged depression, she tells the U.K. publication.

“It was a big old lovely cocktail: being homesick and not knowing it, having not stopped since I was 18, being on my own for large swathes of time," she says of her "full mental breakdown." "It was bad, bad. Awful, actually.”

But the Sound of Metal star didn't step back from acting to focus on her mental well-being.

“Oh, no, I was working all the way through,” says Cooke, who at the time was shooting both Ready Player One and Thoroughbreds. “I was very good at hiding it. If anything, I was like, let me escape myself.”