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 “total mental breakdown” at the age of 22.
The 28-year-old said she battled loneliness while filming the A&E series Bates Motel in Canada.
“I’m very grateful for that job, but I had a really bad time of it,” says Cooke, who played Emma Decody in the Hitchcock-inspired drama, which ran from 2013 to 2017. They all had different stories, so I had a lot of my time in this department in Vancouver, working once every two weeks.”
By 2016, that sense of isolation had turned into a full-blown depression, he tells the UK publication.
“It was a big, lovely cocktail: feeling homesick and not knowing it, not having stopped since I was 18, being alone for long stretches of time,” she says of her “total mental breakdown.” “It was bad, bad. Horrible, actually.
But the Sound of Metal star didn’t stop performing to focus on his mental well-being.
“Oh no, I was working the whole time,” says Cooke, who was shooting both Ready Player One and Thoroughbreds at the time. “He was very good at hiding it. If anything, I was like, let me get away from myself.”
