• Olivia Cooke opened up about her mental health in an interview with the Observer.
• She says she had a breakdown when she was 22 years old.
• The House of the Dragon actress credits A&E’s Bates Motel with helping her come to terms with loneliness.

The House of the Dragon actress Olivia Cooke spoke candidly with the Observer about her mental health.

The actress admitted that when she was 22 years old, she went through a “complete mental breakdown.”

During the A&E television series Bates Motel’s Canadian production, the 28-year-old said that she struggled with loneliness.

“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.”

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