first impression
Marisa Abela’s Yasmin Is the Broken Heart and Spoiled Soul of ‘Industry’
The cutthroat series’ breakout star talks about her character’s dark past, Kit Harington, her screen version of Amy Winehouse, and more
For the past four years, the English actress has been a linchpin of the ensemble cast of Industry. The series —which follows a group of perpetually drugged up and ambition-drunk rookie investment bankers — was created by Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, who cast largely newcomers in an effort to underscore its premise of recent grads struggling in a high-stakes world of sex, money, and power. In three seasons, Industry has gone from an outlier series with a cult following to the new darling of HBO, complete with a prime Sunday-night time slot that used to belong to the network’s prestige hit Succession. Playing Industry’s publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani was Abela’s first professional acting gig out of school, and at first, the role was a soothing training ground where she and her fellow stars could grow and experiment, eventually coalescing into a stellar cohort. But since the show’s explosion in popularity, she has to deal with both a dream and an uncomfortable reality: People are finally watching.
“It’s so weird,” she tells Rolling Stone over Zoom from her London home. “I’ve loved this show from the beginning. I’ve always felt incredibly free and playful in the world of Industry, because there wasn’t this big pressure with the first couple seasons. It felt like everyone was new and trying things out. Now it’s taking on a bigger space in the consciousness. So it’s very nice, but it kind of feels like we’re doing Season One all over again, because it’s reached more people now than it ever has before.”
And what a season for people to finally lock in. Set at the London outpost of the illustrious (and fictional) American investment bank Pierpoint, Industry has always provided a host of ne’er-do-wells and schemers for audiences to both root for and despise. And amid this field of middle-class hustlers, mommy-issues try-hards, and a few downright criminals, the power rankings can flip at a moment’s notice. Such is the case with Season Three, where the stakes and stocks are sky-high. Yasmin has struggled between her desire to prove herself outside of her famous last name and the ease with which that nepotism clears her path. While her friends freak out about paying rent or going broke due to alcoholism, Yasmin is upset because Daddy is too involved in her personal life. Some characters are worried about their friends committing suicide; Yasmin is anxious about which nudes to send. But this season, for the first time, Abela says, Yasmin is finally feeling some of the pressure that’s been with her co-workers the entire time.
Editor’s picks
“For Yasmin, the stakes in Season One and Two might have felt huge, but in reality they were not particularly big,” Abela explains. “This season, she is in pure survival mode, in fight or flight. She genuinely feels like prey and that she could be on the verge of a sort of anxiety-induced breakdown at any given point. Every decision she makes feels like it could have colossal, devastating consequences or be the thing that saves her.”
For Abela, the fear of the future is one that she still holds close. In fact, it’s the reason she almost never became an actress in the first place. Abela was raised on England’s southern coast by her mother, Caroline Gruber, an actor who specializes in theater and stage performances. She can remember spending hours upon hours doing homework with her brother in dressing rooms while their mother rehearsed. She calls it a “fun and joyful” experience, especially when they were able to tour with her around the country or attend rehearsals. But while Abela felt equally called to perform, she initially rejected the idea of acting as a viable career path.
“It was unstable growing up,” she says. “Sometimes [my mother] would be working, and then there’d be six months where she’d be working, like, in Brighton at a call center because she wasn’t working as an actor. It felt kind of scary to me as a kid, to not know how she was doing. And it didn’t feel very safe to jump into.”
After some encouragement from both her mother and some key teachers, Abela applied and was accepted to London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was still there when she — and dozens of classmates — got the blanket casting calls for Industry. Yasmin was complex and intricate, and was calling Abela’s name. “At that time, I was getting scripts for auditions that were to play someone’s daughter, someone’s first girlfriend,” she says. “When I read that first [Industry] script, and it was about young people with a ton of agency, at least in their personal lives, [if not] their professional, it felt incredibly exciting to tell a story where you weren’t a kind of sub-plot and sub-character at that age. The coming-of-age story we were telling just felt so exciting. And, to be honest, it felt like a massive, massive long shot.” She started out from a place of utter excitement. But throughout the audition process, which involved multiple meetings and readings, she realized she didn’t just want the show. She needed it.
“I never thought when I first got that [first call] that I was going to be a part of this show,” she says. “But the more and more I went through the audition, the more I felt like my version of Yasmin [made] a lot of sense to me and in the world of this show. So I became more and more attached. And thank God I got the part.”
With the vulnerabilities, desires, and insecurities she showed as Yasmin, Abela was quickly tapped to star in Back to Black, the divisive Amy Winehouse biopic from director Sam Taylor-Johnson that was released last spring. Portraying such an indelible musical icon would have been a nearly impossible task for even the most seasoned of actors. So by the time “first look” photos debuted Abela’s version of the singer, harsh reactions from audiences and critics alike dogged the film, right up until the moment it left theaters.
Abela acknowledges the icy reception Back to Black received but she says she doesn’t regret the performance she gave. “It was a more exposing experience to anything I’ve dealt with in the past,” she says. “I’ll never fully understand the need to be a negative presence. But I think that my response to it was, and only ever could have, been, to work hard. To create something meaningful and a story that felt like it was being told from the inside out, finally, rather than a kind of voyeuristic look into Amy’s life.”
FILMING FOR SEASON THREE of Industry began seven days after Abela wrapped her six-month stint on the set of Back to Black. And if it were any other project, Abela is sure she wouldn’t have been able to make it work. “I was very grateful that it was Industry I was coming back to,” she says. “ I feel incredibly safe and cared-for and respected on that set, with the creatives, the performers, my colleagues. I also feel that with Yasmin, I know her like the back of my hand. I’ve been doing a character study on Yasmin for five years, so I can just jump in and be her without having to labor over creating some sort of personal history that didn’t exist.”
Yasmin’s bread and butter for this season has remained her complex interpersonal relationships. Her magnate father, Charles Hanani (Adam Levy), has been disgraced as an embezzler and sexual harasser, and has fled the country to avoid extradition for his financial crimes. Yasmin is in a blooming flirtation with Robert (Harry Lawtey) and is undecided over whether to commit to a romance with billionaire (and recent financial failure) Henry Muck (Kit Harington). And her relationship with her former co-worker turned best friend Harper Stern (Myha’la) has given her one of the closest friendships she’s ever felt yet is on the verge of delivering her heaviest heartbreak. Who can she trust?
This tension is where Abela’s skills are on full display. Yasmin has all the makings of a shrill, calculated antagonist. But in Abela’s hands she is frighteningly relatable, made so by her literal refusal to acknowledge the fact that she is breaking the fuck down — and that everyone can see it. The weakness and looming deadlines are on her face, in her shoulders, practically dripping in from her every insecure word. “This season for Yasmin is an Olympic sprint,” Abela says. “You’re just putting everything into [your goal], even if it’s just to survive the day.”
This state of being is only heightened by Harington’s bratty, bumbling version of Muck. He has more money, power, and blood-borne resources than any other character onscreen. He’s also fucking horny. Take for instance, the first scene Abela and Harington ever filmed together — an intimate restaurant meeting where Yasmin arrives to talk business, only for Muck to woo her with an expensive bottle of wine and a request that hints at his urine-related fixations. Yasmin is crumbling under her feelings of powerlessness. And, as if by an act of God, Muck arrives, not only with the power to help her at work, but with a sexual desperation that immediately reminds Yasmin she’s desired. Harington’s Muck could have been an evil caricature. Instead, similar to Yasmin, he’s almost constantly befuddled that all his rank and access and riches can’t make the commoners like him.
“It was just really exciting to feel how sort of powerful [Muck] was, how powerful his choices were, and how much he was still willing to submit to Yasmin in those moments. I think it makes their kind of power play really interesting,” Abela says. “The class system in the UK is something that everyone understands in a really intense way. It’s kind of in our bones to understand that hierarchical system and the idea of an aristocrat like Henry Muck, everyone’s going to have an idea of what that person might look like, sound like, act like, behave. I think that the way that Kit decided to play Henry was genius. “
While each Industry character has been pushed to their physical limits in the show’s latest iteration, the past five episodes have been leading up to a big reveal about Yasmin’s relationship with her father, and a secretive summer she spent on his yacht. Episode Six, “Nikki Beach, or: So Many Ways to Lose,” premiering Sept. 15, details exactly what happens when a Hanani is pushed to their breaking point. “Yasmin, she is being watched at any given time. She is prey masquerading as a predator. And because she’s obsessed with the gaze on her, she’s also incredibly vigilant on everything that’s going on around her at all times,” Abela says. “I had to come to my own conclusions as to what has happened with Yasmin’s father, that makes her make the decisions that she makes on that boat. It’s that ‘what if.’ What if I was this person? What if someone had done that to me? What if someone made me feel that afraid?”
Abela knows that her character is often criticized for how frequently her storylines, and actions, revolve around the men in her life. She’s a daddy’s girl with a fraught relationship, she’s in a situationship with a boy she knows loves her, and she lets a man who almost tanked the British economy piss on her. But an important aspect of how Yasmin interacts with this male-dominated, power-hungry world is that this self-proclaimed feminist isn’t trying to be a revolutionary. She just wants to stay alive.
“It would be amazing if Yasmin felt that she could come out of this situation cleansed of her past, of her father, of the trauma that she’s experienced in her childhood and in her family life. That’s what she would want,” Abela says. “The reality of the situation to her feels more about survival than it does about personal growth.” And what about Yasmin’s future, not just in relationships, but on the floor at Pierpoint? “It’s human instinct to jump onto the branch that looks the sturdiest rather than the one that might snap off in your hands,” Abela says. “When it’s a toss-up between those two things, Yasmin chooses survival.”