Interview: Marisa Abela on The Most Pivotal Relationships in ‘Industry’

“I think it’s always really interesting how the female characters respond to one another in Industry,” says star Marisa Abela, reflecting not only on the HBO series’ central relationship between Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Abela) and Harper Stern (Myha’la), but also Yasmin’s connection to several other female figures in the show.

Season four of Industry has skyrocketed the show to well-deserved new heights (check out our review of S4 HERE), placing cast members like Abela squarely in the Emmys race. This latest season also brings Yasmin into direct confrontation with several new additions to the Industry-verse, including Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) as well as Hayley Clay (Kiernan Shipka), an executive assistant who emerges as both a soft rival and a surprising ally for Yasmin.

“She’s the only other woman, other than Harper, that Yasmin has had any respect for,” says Abela.

But even that respect is a complicated feeling. For the first half of the season, Yasmin maintains a quiet curiosity about Hayley, comfortable in her belief that she is ultimately smarter and more powerful than the young assistant. But in S4E4 “1,000 Yoots, One Marilyn,” it becomes clear that Hayley has much more knowledge of Tender’s inner workings than she had previously let on. That revelation requires a great deal of surrender on Yasmin’s part, no longer in control of Hayley the way she once thought. It is a rich dynamic that, in some ways, mirrors the one between Yasmin and Harper, not to mention Yasmin and Whitney, or even Eric (Ken Leung), the other major American character in the series.

“There’s a very different energy to an American character in Industry than there is in the British characters,” says Abela. “They operate without having to worry about [class], which means so much to a character like Henry, or Yasmin, or Sweetpea.”

Abela’s observation casts one of Industry‘s most essential themes in an entirely new light. For as much as the show centers around wealth and class, its distinctly British conception of those ideas is brilliantly complicated by its American characters, who not only provide an accessible entry point into this world for the millions of Americans watching on HBO Max, but who also move through that world with a kind of disregard for the class structures that have shaped so much of Yasmin’s existence, for better and for worse.

Indeed, Yasmin’s troubled past proves especially pivotal in the final moments of Industry season four (which we discussed in greater detail with co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay HERE), where she makes a consequential decision to become a whole new kind of power broker, almost certainly for the worse.

Check out our full conversation with Marisa Abela below as we dive deeper into that shocking finale, and even tease her upcoming work on films such as Chad Stahelski‘s Highlander.