Hannah Murray’s Weight Gain Sparks Fresh Round of Online Speculation in 2026

Hannah Murray was seventeen when most people first saw her face. She was straying through the first few episodes of Skins as Cassie Ainsworth, a girl who was secretly starving herself in a bedroom in Bristol. Her body was used as a plot device in the show. It turned out that the audience continued to do the same.

Murray’s weight is still a topic of discussion nearly twenty years later, and it reveals more about us than it does about her. When you search for her name, you’ll come across an odd archive: 2019 tabloid rumors about whether she was pregnant during the last season of Game of Thrones, Reddit threads analyzing her face frame by frame, TikToks with titles asking why she “got fat,” all of it piled up next to the real work of an actress who has dedicated her career to portraying women on the verge of something.

The loudest round was in 2019. After Gilly made a brief appearance on screen with what fans perceived to be a fuller face in the second episode of Game of Thrones season eight, Twitter was operating its regular courtroom within hours. Some believed that the showrunners had written her character to become pregnant once more. Others, citing English tabloid reports that Murray had been spotted at a “romantic dinner date” with a visible stomach, were certain that she was pregnant. She had toasted with water rather than wine, as one source reportedly pointed out with the seriousness of a forensic detail. It was all unconfirmed. It never is.

Looking through old pictures from that time period, you are struck by how little there was to look at. Murray frequently dons flowy gowns with soft layers that don’t conflict with the body beneath them. Even EntertainmentNow, which boldly published the rumors, acknowledged that she didn’t seem to have changed much at all after looking through dozens of Getty photos. In other words, the story was primarily about the desire for a story.

When you consider where Murray started, there’s a certain cruelty in this. Fans continue to ask in old Reddit threads whether the actress had to lose weight in order to play Cassie, a character based on an eating disorder that was written with enough detail. Murray has refrained from discussing it in public, and it seems intentional. She has always been a reclusive individual, the type of actress who moves between independent films like Charlie Says and Bridgend with little fanfare, winning a Tribeca Best Actress award one year before vanishing into a Cambridge English degree.

She has posted less than a dozen times on Instagram. There aren’t many interviews with her. From a distance, she appears to be genuinely uninterested in the celebrity machinery, which could be the reason why it keeps reaching for her.

The intriguing thing is that Murray might be prepared to write about some of it at last. It was revealed in January that her debut novel, The Make-Believe, will be published in June 2026. It is described as an autobiography that discusses her involvement with what she refers to as a “wellness organization,” her mental health, and her obsession with its leader. Murray claims that although the experiences were extremely challenging to endure, writing about them has been the most fulfilling thing she has ever done. Reading that gives me the impression that someone is taking back the story on her own terms instead of letting the comment sections dictate it for her.

It’s difficult to ignore the discrepancy between what she genuinely seems to want to tell us and what we keep asking about her. In any case, the body discourse is likely to continue. It always does. However, the more truthful account, which Murray seems to be telling herself, is largely unrelated to the size of her face in a single scene from seven years ago.