SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details from the Season 4 finale of HBO‘s Industry.
At the end of Industry Season 3, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) fires a servant who attempts to comfort her while drawing conclusions about the abuse she experienced as Charles Hanani’s daughter. At the end of Industry Season 4, the demarcations between the publishing dynasty heiress and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell crystallize, as the former aligns herself with a far-right populist party candidate Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft) while orchestrating a “high-minded” networking event where she supplies underage escorts to the powerful men in attendance (many of them eugenicists and/or fascists).
“I think that Yasmin is aware that her own history with abuse and with trauma has left her in a very vulnerable position, and throughout her life, we have seen that she can’t find a way into being taken seriously, to being safe, to having job security, to having relationship security. She has not managed to find stable footing,” Abela tells Deadline. “She starts to see that the way that men have always seen her and treated her, she understands on such a fundamental level, because of her childhood trauma, that she can actually use and manipulate, and she can position herself so that she has a proximity to power if she looks after these other vulnerable women, and I think that is how she sees it.”
That’s as much as Yasmin tells Harper (Myha’la): As she describes, the world isn’t “exploitation or opportunity. It’s both/and” — bestowing the finale episode its title — and she’s making the best of the girls’ inevitable oppression by bargaining with access to privilege.
“She sees herself as kind of a guardian for these younger women who are not as privileged as she is, but have experienced the world in the same way that she has, which is always being subject to objectification at the very, very least, if not harassment or abuse,” Abela explains. “And she has found a way to find some power in that space. I think the way that she would justify it is that: ‘This is the way the world works. It’s going to happen anyway. These women are safer if I’m the one looking after them than if I’m not.’”
In a crushing back-and-forth more sorrowful than any breakup, Yasmin shows Harper the tape of Eric (Ken Leung) having sex with the underage escort; Harper pleads with Yasmin to leave with her and implies the detached words coming out of her mouth are more akin to her late father’s, and when the latter doesn’t budge, Yasmin’s newest ally — Kiernan Shipka‘s Haley — harshly prompts her to depart. It’s an ironic and cruel divergence between the two frenemies, given how fiercely Harper had defended Yasmin against Kwabena’s (Toheeb Jimoh) lackluster evaluation of her just moments ago. Though Harper has often been quick to be silver-tongued in her evisceration of Yasmin, there is, indeed, love lost between them.
“It’s the selfless give of love,” Myha’la says of the moment shared between Harper and Yasmin in the club during the penultimate episode. “It’s also the only time that Harper allows someone else to love her back properly, and she’s sort of trying to figure out what that looks like with Kwabena the whole time. And it just is not there, and it doesn’t work. And I think it’s because she doesn’t believe that he could ever understand her. And the only people who have ever understood her and will ever understand her are probably Eric and Yasmin, and that is the most vulnerable, the most free, the safest I think Harper feels is that moment in the club with Yas.”
Six weeks on from the Tender fallout — Whitney (Max Minghella) on the run from Interpol, Henry (Kit Harington) on house arrest and divorced from Yasmin, Harper vindicated with the success of her short position — Industry sets the stage for further grand ambitions in its fifth and final season. With Haley and Yasmin’s seeming alliance set, the latter’s allegiance to a Reform Party hopeful, Harper’s eyeing of new financial horizons and the hinting at larger geopolitical machinations related to shadowy Russian intelligence interference, creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down are sure to up the ante when it comes to Harper and Yas betting on opposite sides. The closing moments of Season 4 feature the former parroting back the latter’s words: Everything is “both/and.”
“I think the lie Harper has to tell herself is that it isn’t personal at all, and she compartmentalizes her friendship with Yasmin and whatever business relationship they happen to have, but I think also, inside, she’s like, ‘You continue to put yourself in compromising positions, and I can’t do anything about that if I’m trying to run my business,’” Myha’la explains. “There are parts where those compartments get the doors get open, and the insides flow through each other. She does, at some point, try to save Yasmin, or at least warn her, and say, like, ‘I’m giving you an out here.’ But at that point, and I don’t blame her, Yasmin’s like, ‘How can you tell me this isn’t personal? You knew what you were doing,’ so the lines are constantly blurred there, but it is curious how they keep finding themselves in places of competition.”
Below, Shipka also weighs in on how the Season 4 finale sets up her evolving relationship with Yasmin.
DEADLINE: As a newcomer to the show, how did you integrate your character into the fabric of Industry? She feels really lived-in. And there’s all these layers that we kind of unpack throughout the season.
KIERNAN SHIPKA: Thank you. Mickey and Konrad are so careful with their writing, and they make everything so specific and so intentional and so fun to dive into. And she was a character that I had a lot of questions about, especially because we don’t know where she’s come from. She’s kind of plopped into this whole thing, and there’s not a ton of time to get to know her or her backstory before things just kind of go-go, and we’re off to the races, and there’s small indicators of what her life is like outside of what we’re seeing. But it was a lot of calling Mickey and Konrad and asking them 5,000 questions, which they so kindly answered.
I kind of created her own backstory in her world, so that I felt like I was stepping into someone who I already knew, and that’s always a part of my process, but it felt very essential here, because she’s a woman of mystery and has a lot revealed about her throughout the season, so it was very important for me to know her intentions and where she was coming from. But I think, also, it was very helpful to know the tone of the show already, and it was very helpful to hop into a world that was already built, and I could just focus on her and making sure that she was singular.
We see Haley get more entangled with Henry and, specifically, Yas. How much do you see her as being an empowered person and having agency in this arena, versus being at the mercy of these powerful, unscrupulous people, but also making the most of that?
I think she has a ton of agency. I think she’s a very interesting character, because she is incredibly deceptive, and she’s not in a position of power, technically, but she finds it. She gets it. And that, I think, is kind of astonishing on her part. And I think we’re watching her thinking that she is the one who is being taken advantage of, and I think she’s taken a lot of situations where she has been and figured out a way to use that to her benefit and has her eye on the prize in such a hardcore way that she’ll do anything, and she’ll look at anything, as a potential positive and turn anything into a chess piece that she can then play.
It’s revealed Haley works for an escort service, and may or may not have video evidence of the threesome with Henry and Yas. Do you think she would ever use that as leverage, or do you think she’s being truthful it’s deleted? Is that something that you considered when exploring that arc?
I thought about that a lot, and I think at the end of the day, she doesn’t have allegiances to anyone. In the beginning of the series, it seems like she is with Whitney, on Team Whitney, and then when Yasmin comes into the picture, that definitely changes. I do, at the end of the day, think that she is a solo operator and will do whatever it takes to have the access and the power and the influence that she wants. I think the season definitely leans toward her having an allegiance with Yasmin. But I don’t know what Haley will stop at. I think she stops at nothing. I really think she’s that type of person who is not the most trustworthy. So, I don’t know, I don’t know what she’ll do. I think that she doesn’t have a lot of limits, though.
Haley’s journey, to me, seemed to parallel Yasmin’s a little bit. How do you think both of them are willing to trade off and exploit a very amorphous sense of morality to get ahead, and how do you see them converging and going apart?
There’s a level of, like, having to put certain things in a drawer to address later in order for them to both do what they are doing and go where they’re going. And I felt that a lot. Playing someone like Haley, you kind of have to just put judgment aside when you’re doing it. I also want to consider the fact that she is a human and she is thinking about these things and considering them and justifying the game that she’s playing and the positions that she’s putting herself and other people in. And I think Haley is young and has wanted something her whole life, and is finally getting it, and is sort of cutthroat and heartless about it, but I also don’t want to think of her as a person who doesn’t have a heart and isn’t conflicted by these things.
And I think, at the end of the day, that is kind of the justification and the sort of dance that one has to do is complicated. And I think Haley and Yasmin both have that. And they also both have such complicated, tumultuous relationships with men in their lives. And obviously, we know about Yasmin’s history more so than we do Haley’s, but Haley’s is alluded to throughout the season, and the ways in which that can manifest, it can be really difficult and really complicated, and I think both have turned to some bad things, and both share also similar traumas, and it manifests differently in the two of them. But I think you’re right, the Venn diagram overlap is also pretty heavy.
Going back to what you said earlier, you said you developed the backstory for Haley. Were there any other touchstones, or other influences of people or pieces of media that helped inform your performance or was it more just internal work?
Honestly, All About Eve. All About Eve was pretty big for me. That felt very similar to Haley in a lot of ways so that movie, I think, was sort of my main reference point.
I love that movie. Such a good reference.
Classic.
This interview has been condensed and edited for concision and clarity.