‘Industry’ Titans: How Myha’la and Marisa Abela Evolved Into the ‘Emotional Axis’ of the HBO Series

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains mild spoilers for “Industry” Seasons 1-4]

Even over Zoom, “Industry” stars Myha’la and Marisa Abela can instantly flow into a back-and-forth, finishing each other’s thoughts.

“It’s actually incredibly feminist the way you have created this show about finance and—”

“Power and corruption.”

“Or all of this money and there’s two women at the center of it.”

“And no one blinks.”

“No. And you didn’t make them like one of the women is the president, and the other one is the CEO of JPMorgan. They’re just women in this world. And what we care the most about is what’s going on with them.”

Their quick tête-à-tête summarizes the ascension of their characters, Harper Stern and Yasmin Kara-Hanani, that they have had over the last four seasons of the HBO drama, both as influential figures in the London financial world within the text, and as what series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay point to as “the emotional axis of the show, really.”

Down emphasized over Zoom that the provocative financial thriller “was always conceived and sold as an ensemble show because, in its brass tacks, it was a group of grads in investment banking in London.” While the British characters were composites of people he and Kay had encountered in real life, the American protagonist, played by Myha’la, was an original invention intended to serve a couple of purposes.

“We always thought of Harper as an American lens of which to enter the world, because it feels like firstly, the world is quite rarefied, it’s quite impenetrable. It’s very British. So, we thought we needed an anchor for an American audience given we were on an American network,” said Down, knowing the show would be on HBO in the United States. “Also, we just thought if the show is dealing with people who want to accrue power, it’s best to start with someone who has the littlest amount of power and is for all intents and purposes, the most marginalized in this world. So, we thought Harper was a perfect entry point into the show.”

In fact, at the very inception of the show, when there were just two scripts ordered, the first one was through Harper’s perspective, and the second was through the eyes of Abela’s character Yasmin. However, that exercise just got them interested in diving deeper into all the characters they had created — like Robert (Harry Lawtey), Gus (David Jonsson), and even authority figure Eric Tao (Ken Leung).

‘Industry’Courtesy of HBO

Abela did not start off with the impression that Yasmin would become central enough to garner material that would earn her a BAFTA TV Award in 2025. “That very first episode of ‘Industry’ Season 1, I think I had two lines and one of them was I was walking through with some coffees, and it was like, ‘What a way to make a living,’” she said. “I was just thrilled to be there.”

Myha’la was more aware of Harper as the audience’s window into the world of “Industry” through the first two seasons, saying, “She’s the person who we’re told is going to help us move through this world. So the only thing I was conscious of was not fucking up. Even though she’s moving pretty crazy that she’s relatable in some ways sympathetic, or at least, she could be understood,” said the actress. 

But she believes the initial appeal of the show is that everyone starts off in the same boat, in a way viewers could understand. “They relate to being vulnerable and powerless at some point in their life and having big dreams and aspirations and goals to make names for themselves. That’s the thing I think that hooked our audience from day one. And if the Americans could only get through that because I sound the way I sound, then that’s fine.”

As for how Harper and Yasmin became one of the show’s central dynamics, Abela says the “kindling” came in Season 1, Episode 6, where the pair share a cigarette and commiserate over their challenging bosses at a Christmas party for Pierpoint & Co, the fictional financial institution that served as the show’s main setting for the first three seasons. “We really laughed together and I thought, ‘This is one of the most free I’ve felt on this set actually,’” said the actress. “We have a really incredible working relationship and that comes through in the beautiful scenes when we’re able to enjoy each other’s company and be there for one another.”

“Don’t knock chemistry. It’s a real fucking thing,” said Myha’la.

Sagar Radia, Mickey Down, Kit Harington, Marisa Abela, Ken Leung, Konrad Kay and Myha’la attend the HBO’s ‘Industry’ Season 3 Premiere at Metrograph on August 05, 2024 in New York City.Cindy Ord/Getty Images

However, the “move fast, break things” nature of the show evolved in a way that pulled them apart. “Every season, we’ve written it like it’s the last season, and we wanted to do something at the end of Season 2, which broke the grammar of the show in a way. So writing Harper out of Pierpoint was a big narrative choice and it was exciting because it let us go outside the walls of the trading floor,” said Kay. 

Further pondering what to do now with that setting, he and Down thought, “We’ve told this sort of Harper/Eric story, it’s reached a natural conclusion. What does the Yasmin/Eric story look like? Because they’ve never really been on-screen together that much. But also just then it made us think ‘Well, Marisa’s in Pierpoint now, she’s going to be with Ken Leung. It made us almost drill into foregrounding her a little bit in that season.” Specifically by unpacking Yasmin’s issues with her philandering father. “It would be unfair to call Season 3 ‘Marisa’s season,’ but there was a more of a conscious pivot to her as a primary focus in the show alongside Myha’la, and then all of the other characters around them, obviously,” added Kay.

Both the creators and the two “Industry” stars cite a Season 3 argument between Harper and Yasmin, which ends in them slapping each other, as a sort of nexus point for the relationship between the two characters, and the audience’s reaction to them. “The friendship or the frenemiship of the love-hate intensity of their relationship being such a core part of the show and part of the reason that people love the show evolved with us,” said Abela. “You can’t have the highs without the lows.”

“The thing about that slap fight is that they’re saying the most horrible things imaginable to each other, but everything they’re saying has a grain of truth. And it’s indicative of the fact that they know each other so well because they know these pressure points,” said Down. “The closest people to you know how to hurt you the worst.”

The way that manifests in the latest season, Season 4, is first with what Myha’la saw as a breakthrough for Harper, who she says started off as “way more elusive in her feelings,” not wanting her lack of certain credentials to overshadow her financial aptitude. “That has been her focus, successful in the job. We see that with the way she ends up fucking over Yasmin many times throughout Season 2, Season 3,” said the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series Emmy contender. “A very slight change happens where she’s still about the trade, she’s still about the job, but now she’s living the life that she promised herself she would live. She’s her own boss, she has employees, she’s a market mover. Her reputation is undeniable on the street. So now she’s in a place of power. She’s still after the trade, but it’s not as desperate. It’s not as risky. And so now I think she’s got the space and opportunity to find some other shit to care about.”

‘Industry’Courtesy of HBO

For the first time ever, she warns Yasmin that the company Tender, which she and her husband Henry (Kit Harington) have become enmeshed in, will fail. “She says, ‘I’m shorting this. It’s going to go down badly. Get out.’ We’ve never seen her do that. Yasmin’s the only other person she’s ever protected, but not at the potential expense of her own trade. That is a crucial moment,” said Myha’la. “We start to see that Harper might start to run on emotions, might start to follow her heart in some ways. The trade is no longer the most important thing. She doesn’t feel at risk as much anymore.”

Unfortunately, that is met by Yasmin further likening herself to Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, inviting Harper to a party she’s hosting for a burgeoning far-right politician, which is highly surveilled and attended by questionably young women. In the Season 4 finale, “She’s exactly where she wants to be. It’s necessary [that] people look to her for guidance and counsel. They may be the most awful people on the planet, but there are at least people who are looking at her and not looking at her like she’s a dummy for once, and she actually has some efficacy and value, and that’s all she’s ever wanted,” said Down. 

The message it is sending to her friend Harper is “look, these people value me. You may not. You might think I’ve got nothing between my ears and that actually all I am is sex, all I am as a bag of traumas, but what I am to these people is necessary, and I hope by osmosis, you’ll see that I’m necessary as well,” he added. 

Kay describes Harper and Yasmin as “mountain spelunking buddies” while outlining their friendship arc: “As they go deeper and deeper into this world, they need each other as a litmus test for their own moral degradation. So they need to keep each other around because they’ve seen each other, they’ve given each other their most vulnerable selves in the boat. They’ve had moments of this true connection. So there’s a measure, they’re a yardstick for each other. There’s a sanity check where if they lose each other, then they don’t have their spelunking partner or the person who’s going to go up or down the mountain with them.”

He goes on to say, “They’re mirror images, yin and yang, from the first moment they meet each other, they see each other’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of their own deficiencies reflected back to them like, ‘What does she have that I envy? What do you have that I don’t have?’” 

‘Industry’Courtesy of HBO

Yasmin’s heel turn directly stems from that dynamic with Harper that Myha’la laid out. “What she’s metabolized from her relationship with Harper is [that] nothing should stand between you and your own sense of self-advancement. ‘I’m using your operating software for the first time, and what? You just don’t like the sight of it?,’” said Kay. “It’s not a rational POV, but it’s rational to the character in the situation.”

The co-showrunner concluded, “What happens in that room in Paris feels like a sort of Rubicon’s being crossed, and obviously in Season 5, we’re going to have to address it,” said Kay. “And it’s not as simple as walking it back and putting the genie back in the bottle because whatever happened in that room, it’ll sit underneath their relationship into the last frame of whatever we end up dramatizing with their relationship because there’s no way of eradicating it. I don’t think you can go back from it.”

While the creators of the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy contender are still figuring out how they want to land the plane, with “Industry” Season 5 recently being announced as the show’s final season, Down says the process now starts with Myha’la and Abela’s performances as inspiration. “Every season is kind of an exercise in how much can we throw at them and how much can they give us back? And every season they sort of top each other in how good they can be.”

The stars have taken notice. “Partly the reason that Yasmin and Harper’s relationship is so complicated is because of the genuine love and connection that Myha’la and I have for one another,” said Abela, an Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Emmy contender. “If we really fucking hated each other, then it would be a totally different show,” said Myha’la. Going back to their initial point of “Industry” finding its way toward being a women-led show organically, Abela said. “It should be a prerequisite, but the truth is it’s not. We still live in a world where trying to get unlikable or complicated women on screen is difficult. And having women lead a show is difficult.” 

“I also don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, these are good men because they care about me.’ I think they’re just smart. They just have eyes,” said Myha’la. “And not to big myself up or big her up too much, but game recognized game. Mickey and Konrad said, ‘Oh, we have two bossy bitches. They have their own lives. They are eager to challenge us.’ And they said, “Respect. We see what you want to do. We want to do it with you.’”

Myha’la and Marisa Abela at 2026 Deadline Contenders Television held at the Directors Guild of America on April 26, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.Chad Salvador/Deadline

One element of the series most indicative of the strength of the bond between Myha’la and Abela, as Harper and Yasmin, is that the characters do not need to share that many scenes together for the audience to understand that bond’s importance to the show. “Even though the show, actually in the last couple of seasons, hasn’t had that many Harper and Yasmin scenes, their ability to kill each other and hate each other and their cosmic battle is always at the center of it,” said Down. Even when the characters are on the furthest ends of the spectrum away from each other, like at the end of Season 4, Myha’la says, “Inevitably, [the writers] know we can find a genuine way back to one another and it will feel real and authentic, and it won’t feel forced.”

Though “where they end is where they lie forever,” both actresses approach the end of “Industry” with a sense of excitement. “Having played this character and given so much to this TV show and loved doing it so intensely, it’s been the great privilege of my career, and I just can’t wait to do it again and give it everything and say goodbye to Yasmin,” said Abela. Thinking about what’s next for Harper and Yasmin in particular, Myha’la says, “Really hoping to leave no stone unturned. I want to walk away feeling like I did everything I could do, and we can leave them behind, and it’s OK.”

“Industry” Seasons 1-4 are now streaming on HBO Max.