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MOVING FORWARD

‘The Boys’ Star Says Health Crisis Made Her Sleep 19 Hours a Day

The actress says she experienced a mental-health emergency that warranted hospitalization.

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

PublishedMay 28, 2026, 3:43 PM EDT

UpdatedMay 28, 2026, 3:52 PM EDT

Updated May 28, 2026, 3:52 PM EDTPublished May 28, 2026, 3:43 PM EDT

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The Boys star Erin Moriarty revealed devastating details of her battle with Graves’ disease, which took such a toll on her mental health that she eventually did a stint in a hospital.

In a Time essay titled “My Public Battle With Graves’ Disease Nearly Destroyed Me,” the 31-year-old actress opened up about her diagnosis, including the criticism she received over her appearance during a highly vulnerable period.

“Post-birth-control syndrome. Bipolar disorder. Anxiety disorder. Clinical depression. Chronic fatigue. An intestinal parasite. Burnout. IBS,” she writes. “My doctors floated all of these potential diagnoses before arriving at the correct one. At my core, I knew none of them were right.”

Moriarty played Annie January, whose superhero name is Starlight, for six seasons of Prime Video’s satirical superhero series The Boys.

She first revealed that she had been diagnosed with the autoimmune disease in June 2025.

Graves’ disease, a condition more common among women than men, causes the thyroid gland in the neck to produce an excessive amount of thyroid hormone.

It can cause weight loss, increase the risk of heart failure and thyroid cancer, as well as cause bones to thin, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Moriarty first began noticing symptoms in September 2023, when she was 29. The condition manifested as fatigue that eventually turned “incapacitating.”

“I began sleeping through every alarm,” she writes, adding that she would sleep over 19 hours a day on the weekends.

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“The mood swings I had experienced years earlier intensified. My hands and feet became so weak and numb that walking began to feel dangerous. I developed heart palpitations and persistent urinary pain,” she recalls.

Adding, “But the most frightening symptom of all was the cognitive decline. My short-term memory deteriorated so severely that learning even simple lines became difficult—terrifying when you’re filming a television show.”

Moriarty says that she and her medical team were confused by her symptoms, and she grew afraid. Eventually, doctors instructed her to meet with a neurologist.

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“By that point, I was preparing myself for the possibility that I was dying,” she writes. “I was in so much discomfort that the idea of death felt like a potential relief. Death felt less terrifying than living in that state indefinitely.”

After extensive testing, Moriarty finally received a diagnosis for Graves’ disease in May 2025, while she was filming the final season of The Boys.

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“That was the day my life began again. Not because it instantly fixed everything, but because it finally gave shape to the chaos,” she writes.

But after months of treatment, the trauma persisted, and she was “hospitalized following a severe mental-health crisis” on August 1, 2025.

“I had been hormonally dysregulated, cognitively impaired, and psychologically untethered for so long that recovery didn’t bring me peace,” Moriarty says. Instead, she felt grief for everything she had lost due to her illness.

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Going through the symptoms while in the public eye was challenging, she writes.

Over the past three years, the actress has often been the subject of speculation about plastic surgery.

In 2024, she even momentarily deleted her social media after podcast host Megyn Kelly made a segment of Moriarty’s appearance.

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Kelly claimed that Moriarty had “completely changed her face” with plastic surgery, which prompted people to send hateful comments and messages to the actress.

“I was going through the physical hell of chronic illness on a public stage,” Moriarty now writes.

“Doing it in private is emotionally damaging enough, but to have my physical symptoms be speculated about, trivialized, and dismissed was devastating.”

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In May 2026, Moriarty, now a year into her treatment, hopes her story can help others who may still be searching for answers about their symptoms.

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“The body speaks long before it screams,” she writes. “Listen to yourself before your body is forced to scream loud enough for the world to hear it, too.”

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

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