The last time we saw Myha’la’s Harper Stern — almost two years ago, in the Season 2 finale of “Industry” — she had just been displaced from her center of gravity. While her mentor, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), avoided eye contact, an HR official sternly told her that elite bank Pierpoint & Co. had learned that her college transcript was a forgery. Minutes earlier, Eric announced that he had footed the bill for Harper’s months-long hotel stay during the lockdown, a testament to their quasi-filial bond; now he stabbed her in the back. “I have to let you go,” Eric croaked. The line was standard business-speak, but in Leung’s speech it sounded more like a break.
‘Industry,’ the provocative, fast-paced HBO drama set in the world of London’s finance, is built around Harper, a young woman who has left a troubled home life in New York to find a place as an analyst at Pierpoint has managed to acquire. . That deception overtook her in the final moments of Season 2, reflecting Eric’s increasing wariness of his protégé and the ruthless ambition he had once encouraged. It was Eric who first took a chance on Harper, seeing a fellow outsider without the privileges of whiteness or generational wealth. By engineering her demise, he staked a stake in the show’s beating heart — and paved the way for Harper to rise from the dead stronger than ever. “We kind of blew this whole place wide open,” says Myha’la, dialing in via Zoom from her Brooklyn apartment. “Now we have Harper off the bench. Everything is possible!”
For Harper, and for “Industry,” the stakes are exponentially higher in Season 3, premiering August 11. In the midst of a slow-moving 2024 brought on by last year’s twin strikes, HBO has cashed in on “Industry” — which developed a cult following in its first two seasons as a late-capitalist response to the youthful debauchery of “Skins” — a prime real estate asset: the now airs on Sundays at 9pm, taking over from the franchise mega-hit ‘House of the Dragon’. ‘after the second season ends. (Kit Harington has doubled down on the “Game of Thrones” connection, joining the cast of “Industry” as an aristocratic, whimsical entrepreneur.) And at the center of this leveling up is Myha’la, who at 28 itself at the top. edge of the transition from a breakout star to an ordinary star. As Harper, she’s burned bridges as if her life depended on it, but the world “Industry” portrays is so cruel and transactional that enemies can become allies and vice versa in the blink of an eye. If that register reminds you of the Roy family from “Succession,” then you’re onto something: “Industry” is HBO’s best chance at satisfying audiences still mourning the loss of that show.
Myha’la has been deeply involved in shaping Harper from the early days of “Industry,” when creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay selected her audition tape from a field of more than 200 submissions. She had just graduated from Carnegie Mellon, while the show consisted of a handful of scripts by Down and Kay, both of whom had done post-Oxford stints on the trading floor before switching careers. In many ways, Myha’la and her character grew up together. “There’s a softness to her, which is actually a good thing because it’s at odds with Harper’s hardness,” Kay says. “There is a hybrid of total self-control and total vulnerability.” It was Myha’la who suggested that Harper put on a steel front instead of wearing her insecurities on her sleeve as she was initially written to do.
In a show so British that it’s a co-production with the BBC, a black American woman is a counterintuitive choice for the lead character. Yet Harper is perfectly positioned to both act as Virgil and guide the viewer who feels just as out of place – as well as to manipulate the expectations of others. “She thinks about everything in terms of the benefit to her,” Myha’la says of Harper’s views on race and gender. “She uses the way she is perceived in the industry to her advantage because she believes people will underestimate her. Which equal parts makes her angry and excited, because she can use it.
“Industry” is set in a jargon-drenched world that is deliberately inscrutable to citizens, while its actors have the formidable task of making monetary maneuvers legible to the viewer – often by imbuing them with emotional stakes. “Me and Konrad have this thing that we always say to each other when we audition actors: ‘Do they have that too?’ behaviour?’” says Down, an abbreviation for unaffected, natural performance. Myha’la exhibits behavior in their eyes and ours. We may not understand the details of Harper’s last transaction, but we always understand what she wants and needs out of the transaction. Even three seasons later, “the financial stuff really goes in one ear and explodes out of the back of my head,” Myha’la says with a laugh. “The most important thing for me to do my job well is to understand how people are financed feeling about these things. And I understand that.”
Myha’la on the set of “Industry”
Simon Ridgway/HBO
If Season 2 broadened the show’s emotional canvas and introduced the family members who turned these young people into the amoral, coke-snorting, cutthroat financiers that they are, then Season 3 further broadens the scope. After Eric’s betrayal, Harper has found himself at a fund dedicated to so-called impact investing in environmentally friendly companies, a real financial trend that taps into a core theme of the “Industry”: reflexive cynicism toward for-profit institutions that feign social consciousness. . Harper shares that cynicism with Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg of “Barry”), a new colleague whose firm boundaries stand in stark contrast to Eric’s filter-free management style. “Petra admires Harper’s intelligence and drive, but she tries to teach her the hard lesson of separating the business from the personal – with limited success,” Goldberg says via email, going on to praise Myha’la as “the best kind of actor: does her homework, but is completely effortless and present.”
The schism between Eric and Harper doesn’t mean the dynamic duo will be permanently separated. Instead, Season 3 builds tension over several episodes, then releases it in a handful of shared scenes that crackle with delicious bitterness. Within Pierpoint, the couple’s interests were nominally aligned, regardless of their ups and downs. “But breaking the contract between them made me think, ‘Fuck, now we have two powerhouse opponents,'” Kay says. He and Down exercised restraint in setting off the resulting fireworks: “It’s like having little sticks of dynamite and knowing exactly where to put them all season long.”
Myha’la says it was “literally horrible” having to go months without her former scene partner, but cathartic to reunite — even if the material was the opposite of heartwarming. “Ken and I have created such a safe workspace together that we can go anywhere – we can say anything, do anything with each other, within the confines of the scene,” she says. “Especially if it’s a scene where we can yell at each other! That, for example, is an actor’s crack.
With Harper forced out of the Pierpoint viper’s nest, season 3 sees her travel further afield, from a sprawling English estate to a yacht off the coast of Mallorca. In flashbacks aboard the boat, Harper and publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), her former colleague and eternal enemy, experience a life-changing experience that looms over the events of the season. Myha’la is candid about what it feels like to film in a hot, humid, enclosed space while battling seasickness – in short, it’s ‘crap’ – but also points out the significance of such a luxurious location for the ‘industry ‘.
“The show looks so big; it looks so expensive,” she says. “In season 1 we were all like, ‘Is this going to happen again?’ There were no certainties. So to come this far with people you love and respect, it’s just so rewarding to see it develop the way it has.”
Plagued by gossip scandal and left behind at Pierpoint, Abela’s Yasmin rises to full co-lead in Season 3, stepping into the vacuum left by Eric and Harper’s broken partnership. The shift in focus puts the spotlight on Yasmin and Harper’s volatile bond, one marked by jealousy, suspicion and sporadic solidarity as they try to establish themselves. Abela points to the flashbacks to Mallorca as evidence of the emotional depth ‘Industrie’ has achieved, despite a setting that breeds icy realpolitik. “There’s a lot of intimacy in ‘Industry,’ in a sexual sense – and those scenes were by far the most intimate scenes I’ve ever shot on this show,” Abela says of the Spanish interlude. “It was incredible to be able to do that with her.”
Now that ‘Industry’ has taken off, so have the careers of the cast. Earlier this year, Abela played the role of singer Amy Winehouse in the biopic ‘Back to Black’. Last December, Myha’la appeared alongside Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali in Sam Esmail’s adaptation of “Leave the World Behind,” one of the most-watched films in Netflix history. She also had roles in the Sony Pictures docudrama “Dumb Money” and the A24 slasher comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies”; At the time of our interview, she has just returned from filming the untitled biopic of Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd with Lily James in Los Angeles, where a mild case of COVID prevented our in-person meeting.
Spending time on film sets was a change of pace for Myha’la. “I thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone telling everyone to hurry?’” she says. “I come from the land of television; we have to shoot a million pages a day. I am confused. Why isn’t everyone sweating?” The Hollywood jobs coincided with Myha’la’s decision to no longer use her last name in a professional context. (She was previously identified as Myha’la Herrol.) “My name is so unique – it’s completely made up – and my last name is pretty corny. I never thought they would go together,” she says. “Finally I was in a place where I had the tools and the ability to change it.” Last year she quietly started using the mononym, a switch she discusses here for the first time. “I’m one of those,” she says, smiling. “You can tie me to Madonna and Cher.”
While “Industry” awaits news on a Season 4 renewal, Myha’la is focusing on other goals. She would like to direct and also return to the theater, where she received her university education. “So many people say, ‘Oh, my God, you’re living your dreams.’ And I’m like, kinda!” she says. “I work full-time as an actor and that is my dream. But my dream is actually to make my Broadway debut.
“Industry” is essentially a coming-of-age story, and the characters’ growing confidence mirrors that of the cast. “The older we get, the more we move away from teen dramas,” notes Myha’la. She’s referring to the plot, which has gradually shifted from entry-level workers looking for support (and letting off steam) to adults reckoning with who they’ve become. But Myha’la could easily talk about the roles open to her as she progresses. Like Harper, she has her sights firmly set on heaven.