Industry’s Marisa Abela Is Rooting for Yasmin and Robert

Industry, the red-hot HBO show about investment bankers making bad life choices, has kicked into high gear in season three. This is in no small part to a plot that foregrounds Yasmin Kara-Hanani, resident rich girl with daddy issues, played masterfully by Marisa Abela. Industry season three finds Yasmin broke and said father supposedly on the run, after he was exposed for being a major embezzler. She’s being hounded by the paps, pursuing a relationship with the emotionally-stunted green energy CEO Henry Muck (Game of Thrones’s Kit Harington), and forever and always toying with the emotions of Robert (Harry Lawtey), the sweet working class colleague who’s not-so-secretly pining away for her.

Episode five is an introspective one for Yaz. Things between her and Henry blow up spectacularly, she learns that her missing father—or at least, his body—has been found, and shares some moody, atmospheric final moments with Robert in bed.

Here, Marisa Abela talks to GQ about whether Yasmin is good at her job and who the real villain of Industry is, and helped us psychoanalyze our favorite heiress.

GQ: Inasmuch as there’s a main character this season, it’s Yasmin. How did the creators tee up that arc for you?

Marisa Abela: It always felt like an ensemble show to me. With Yasmin this season, I’m always excited to push the boundaries of Yasmin and who she is and what she wants and where she’s going. So to have a scope of story this season that was slightly bigger was just exciting for me to be able to expand into that place.

What does she want this season? What’s motivating her and how has that changed since season one?

In season one, the stakes for Yasmin were far, far lower. They might have felt enormous to her at the time, but the truth is that if she got fired from her job, she’d have been fine. If none of these friendships worked out, she’d have been fine. The difference between Yasmin and Harper, for example, has always been that Yasmin’s life was sort of answered for—she always had a safety net. And in season three there’s no safety net. So we are seeing her for the first time discover what life is like if the stakes are higher. If you get fired from your job, you have no money. If your dad is on the run, you have a lot to answer for. They’re huge stakes. Yasmin’s kind of in fight or flight the whole season. She’s in survival mode and the choices that someone might make from a place of fight or flight are going to be very different and more dramatic than if everything’s going to be okay in the end.

You work very closely with Kit Harington this season. How did you two bond and get comfortable with each other?

First of all, I just thought he was so brilliant when he came in and I heard him for the first time as Henry. It’s a really interesting character, and after watching Kit do it, I realized how difficult a role to play it was in the sense that he’s walking this tightrope of playing an aristocrat who has no grip on reality and an incredibly vulnerable kind of boy who just wants to be sort of loved and adored by the public. Henry is quite similar to Yasmin in that they put themselves in a situation that they don’t need to be in financially to prove themselves in some way and aren’t necessarily doing a particularly good job of it. I think that they understand each other in that sense, and I just found the way that he was working so interesting and funny and nuanced, and I had a lot of respect for his work. The first scene we filmed together was the scene in episode two at the restaurant where he makes her refresh The Daily Mail, and we had a lot of time in between setups to get to know each other and talk to one another. He’s such a nice man, and we got on really well, and I feel very lucky to have worked with him this season.