Olivia Cooke has been a part of the industry for a while, and has done several critically acclaimed films and shows like ‘Sound of Metal‘, ‘Thoroughbred‘, and ‘Ready Player One’. She is currently portraying Alicent Hightower in HBO’s fantasy series ‘House of the Dragon.’
The 28-year-old English actress opened up about her struggle with mental health when she shifted to the United States to film ‘Bates Motel.’ She talked about the mental breakdowns she would experience during that time. Let’s find out what more the ‘Ouija‘ actress said.
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Olivia Cooke Talks About Her Mental Health Struggle
Cooke has received praise for her portrayal of an adult Alicent Hightower in HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon.’ However, amid all the glitz and glamour we tend to forget that these celebs are also human.
In an interview with The Guardian, Cooke talked about her struggle with mental health in her early 20s while filming ‘Bates Motel.’ “I’m so grateful for that job, but I had a really tough time on it,” she said.
She added, “I was working all the way through. I was very good at hiding it. If anything, I was like, let me escape myself.”
around 2019 IS when “the incessant, persistent, anxious thoughts” she had started to die out. She said moving out of the US helped. “What was really healing was moving back to London”.
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Cooke Wasn’t Feeling “100 Percent” At That Time
In the same interview, Cooke talked about the tight schedule at that time and not always feeling “100 percent”. “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,” she said.
Cooke also said that she was under the legal drinking age, which meant she couldn’t go out to socialize and meet people during her downtime. “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 recalled.
She also had a “full mental breakdown” when she was just 22. “It was bad, bad. Awful, actually.” Cooke moved in 2016, right when Donald Trump became President.
“I was like: ‘Wow, my rights aren’t a given, it’s 2016, and I’m still not seen as an equal…and I’m a white woman, so I’m still leaps and bounds ahead of others,‘” she said.
