The last time we laid eyes on Myha’la’s Harper Stern — nearly two years ago, in the Season 2 finale of “Industry” — she had just been ejected from her center of gravity. As her mentor, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), avoided eye contact, an HR officer sternly informed her that elite bank Pierpoint & Co. had learned her college transcript was a forgery. Minutes earlier, Eric disclosed he’d footed the bill for Harper’s monthslong hotel stay during lockdown, a testament to their quasi-filial bond; now, he was stabbing her in the back. “I have to let you go,” Eric croaked out. The line was standard corporate-speak, but in Leung’s delivery, it sounded more like a breakup.
“Industry,” the provocative, fast-paced HBO drama set in the world of London high finance, is built around Harper, a young woman who’s ditched a troubled home life in New York and faked her way into a spot as an analyst at Pierpoint. That deception caught up with her in the final moments of Season 2, which followed through on Eric’s mounting wariness toward his protégé and the ruthless ambition he’d once encouraged. It was Eric who’d first taken a chance on Harper, seeing a fellow outsider without the privileges of whiteness or generational wealth. By engineering her downfall, he put a stake in the show’s beating heart — and set the stage for Harper to rise from the dead, stronger than ever. “We kind of blew this whole place wide open,” Myha’la says, patching in via Zoom from her Brooklyn apartment. “Now we’ve got Harper outside the bank. Anything is possible!”
For Harper, and for “Industry,” the stakes are exponentially higher in Season 3, which premieres on Aug. 11. In the midst of a slow-going 2024 caused by last year’s dual strikes, HBO has bestowed upon “Industry” — which developed a cult following over its first two seasons as a late-capitalist answer to the youthful debauchery of “Skins” — some prime real estate: It will now air on Sundays at 9 p.m., taking over for the franchise megahit “House of the Dragon” after its second season concludes. (Doubling down on the “Game of Thrones” connection, Kit Harington has joined the cast of “Industry” as an aristocratic, erratic entrepreneur.) And at the center of this leveling up is Myha’la, who at 28 is herself on the verge of transitioning from breakout star to just plain star. As Harper, she’s burned bridges like her life depended on it, but the world “Industry” depicts is so vicious and transactional that enemies can become allies in an instant and vice versa. If that register reminds you of the Roy family of “Succession,” you’re onto something: “Industry” is HBO’s best chance at pleasing the audience still mourning the loss of that show.
Myha’la has been intimately involved in shaping Harper from the earliest 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 amounted to a handful of scripts by Down and Kay, who’d both done post-Oxford stints on the trading floor before switching careers. In many ways, Myha’la and her character have grown up together. “There’s a softness to her, which is actually really good for how at odds it is with Harper’s flintiness,” Kay says. “There’s this hybrid of total self-possession and total vulnerability.” It was Myha’la who suggested Harper present a steely front rather than wear her insecurities on her sleeve, as she was initially written.
On a show so British it’s a co-production with the BBC, a Black American woman is a counterintuitive choice of protagonist. Yet Harper is perfectly positioned both to act as Virgil, guiding the viewer who feels similarly out of place — and to manipulate others’ expectations. “She thinks about anything in terms of its benefit to her,” Myha’la says of Harper’s views on race and gender. “The way she’s perceived in the industry — she uses that to her benefit, because she believes that people are going to underestimate her. Which equal parts angers her and excites her, because she can use it.”
“Industry” takes place in a jargon-saturated world that’s deliberately inscrutable to civilians, while its actors have the formidable task of rendering monetary maneuvers legible to the viewer — often by imbuing them with emotional stakes. “Me and Konrad have this thing we always say to each other when we audition actors: ‘Do they have behavior?’” Down says, a shorthand for unaffected, natural performance. Myha’la, to their eyes and ours, has behavior. We may not understand the minutiae of Harper’s latest trade, but we always understand what she wants and needs out of the transaction. Even three seasons in, “the finance stuff genuinely goes in one ear and explodes out the back of my brain,” Myha’la says with a laugh. “The thing that’s most important to me to be able to do my job well is to understand how finance people feel about these things. And that, I understand.”
Myha’la on the set of “Industry”
Simon Ridgway/HBO
If Season 2 widened the show’s emotional canvas, introducing the family members who made these young people into the amoral, coke-snorting, cutthroat financiers they are, then Season 3 is a further broadening in scope. After Eric’s betrayal, Harper has landed at a fund dedicated to so-called impact investing in eco-friendly companies, a real-life financial trend that dovetails with a core “Industry” theme: 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 are in stark contrast with Eric’s filter-free management style. “Petra admires Harper’s intelligence and drive, but she is trying to teach her the hard lesson of separating business from the personal — with limited success,” says Goldberg over email, going on to praise Myha’la as “the best kind of actor: does her homework, but then is completely effortless and present.”
The schism between Eric and Harper doesn’t mean the dynamic duo are permanently kept apart. Instead, Season 3 builds tension over several episodes, only to release it in a handful of shared scenes that crackle with delicious acrimony. Within Pierpoint, the pair’s interests were nominally aligned, whatever their ups and downs. “But by breaking that contract between them, it was like, ‘Fuck, now we have two powerhouses who are adversaries,’” Kay says. He and Down exercised restraint in deploying the resulting fireworks: “It’s like having little sticks of dynamite, and knowing exactly where to place them throughout the season.”
Myha’la says it was “literally horrible” to go without her onetime scene partner for months at a time, but cathartic to reunite — even if the material was the opposite of heartwarming. “Ken and I have created such a safe working space together that we can go anywhere — we can say anything, do anything to each other, in the confines of the scene,” she says. “Especially if it’s a scene where we get to scream at each other! Like, that is an actor’s crack.”
With Harper forced out of the Pierpoint vipers’ nest, Season 3 sees her ranging farther 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 co-worker and eternal frenemy, have a life-altering experience that looms over the events of the season. Myha’la is frank about how it feels to film in a hot, humid, enclosed space while battling seasickness — in a word, it “sucks” — but also notes the significance for “Industry” of such a luxurious location.
“The show looks so huge; it looks so expensive,” she says. “In Season 1, all of us were like, ‘Is this even gonna go again?’ There were no certainties. So, to come this far with people who you love and respect — it’s just so rewarding to watch it expand in the way that it has.”
Beset by tabloid 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 shattered partnership. The shift in focus puts a spotlight on Yasmin and Harper’s unstable bond, one marked by jealousy, suspicion and sporadic solidarity as they attempt to establish themselves. Abela points to the Mallorca flashbacks as evidence of the emotional depth “Industry” has achieved, despite a setting that breeds icy realpolitik. “There’s a lot of intimacy on ‘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.”
As “Industry” has taken off, so have the careers of its cast. Earlier this year, Abela starred as 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 parts in the Sony Pictures docudrama “Dumb Money” and the A24 slasher comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies”; at the time of our interview, she’s just returned from shooting the untitled biopic of Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd alongside Lily James in Los Angeles, where a mild case of COVID prevented our meeting in person.
Spending time on film sets was a change of pace for Myha’la. “I was like, ‘Why is nobody telling everyone to hurry up?’” she says. “I’m coming from the land of TV; we have to shoot a million pages a day. I’m confused. Why is everyone not sweating?” The Hollywood jobs coincided with Myha’la’s decision to stop using her last name in a professional context. (She’d previously been credited as Myha’la Herrold.) “My name is so unique — it’s completely made up — and my last name is pretty pedestrian. I’ve never thought they go together,” she says. “Finally, I was at the place where I had the resources and the opportunity to change it.” She quietly began using the mononym last year, a switch she discusses for the first time here. “I’m one of those,” she says, smiling. “You can rope me in with Madonna and Cher.”
While “Industry” awaits news of a Season 4 renewal, Myha’la is focusing on other goals. She’d like to direct, and also return to the theater, where she did her college training. “So many people are like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re living your dreams.’ And I’m like, kind of!” she says. “I’m working full time as an actor, and that is my dream. But my dream is, really, to make my Broadway debut.”
“Industry” is fundamentally a coming-of-age story, and the growing confidence of its characters reflects that of the cast. “The older we get, the more we move away from teen drama,” Myha’la observes. She’s referring to the plot, which has gradually shifted gears from entry-level employees scrambling for a toehold (and blowing off steam) to adults reckoning with who they’ve become. But Myha’la could easily be talking about the roles that have opened up to her as she progresses. Like Harper, she’s got her sights set firmly skyward.