When 29-year-old Industry star Myha’la wakes up each morning, she picks from a deck of cards decorated with healing prompts from heavenly messengers. Each is a sign of a new affirmation; a focus for her day ahead. The angel cards recently encouraged her to “sever vows of poverty”. “It’s about releasing yourself from a scarcity mindset and accepting that life is taking care of you, and that abundance belongs to you,” she tells me serenely, sipping on tea in a beige-hued Berlin hotel room. “It really soothes the soul for me.”
Myha’la is calm, grounded and warm: poles apart from her Industry character, the impulsive, calculating and cold Harper Stern, whose morning routine more aptly begins with a line of cocaine and six caffeinated drinks, followed by a liquid lunch. Harper leads the masochistic world of the BBC and HBO banking drama – now three episodes into its fourth season – which follows a group of banking grads’ ascension from the merciless trading floor of a London investment bank to the upper echelons of the financial sector (think Euphoria meets Succession with a side order of Mad Men – or a Tory-stained Skins).
The foetal Oxbridge grads we met in 2020’s pilot appear to have made it: Harper is power hungry as the figurehead of an aristocrat’s investment fund; Marisa Abela’s beguiling Yasmin has bagged her spiralling husband Lord Henry Muck (Kit Harington) a job as CEO of a new dodgy bank. Minutes into the new season, Harper sashays from a chauffeured Range Rover in layers of shoulder-padded grey power tailoring, before berating a man who collapses at her feet. “If you’re gonna have a f***ing stroke, please do it outside of my office,” she seethes. The show is better than it ever was – daring, twisted, top-tier television. And the five-star reviews have a lot to do with Myha’la’s gripping, gum-chewing performance.
They might have completely antithetical temperaments, but Myha’la didn’t have to look far to relate to Harper. Both are ambitious young Black American women working in an elite, cutthroat environment – and at the apex of their careers. “It does feel like life imitates art or vice versa,” says Myha’la, who’s speaking to me on a European stint of her Industry promo duties. “Harper’s still trying to win, but she’s not clawing anymore; she’s not scrambling.”
Myha’la, bare-faced and casual in a grey hoodie, isn’t clawing anymore, either. Thanks to nabbing her leading Industry role straight out of drama school – and a list of other credits that includes the Gen Z slasher Bodies, Bodies, Bodies – she has the most career confidence and money she’s ever had (behold the angel cards!). “As a younger version of myself, I was trying to get it right and be perfect every time,” she says. “But now, I’m OK if it doesn’t feel like I’m doing a perfect job because I believe in my philosophy, which is that there isn’t necessarily a right answer with acting as long as it’s true.”
There is plenty of raw, uncompromising truth for her to work with on Industry. The show’s writers, Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, were inspired by their brief stints in the drug-soaked finance industry after graduating from Oxford University, observing how sex (and lots of it) is used to leverage power in Britain’s most elite circles. So far in season four, we’ve watched Harper order her underling Kwabena (Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh) to send hostile work emails on her behalf mid-coitus. She also sleeps with a shady CFO, Whitney (Max Minghella from The Handmaid’s Tale), to dig for insider information about his company’s questionable dealings in Ghana. She is a woman always on the job.
Myha’la and I are speaking the morning after Harper’s steamy strap-on rendezvous with Whitney is aired. Has she looked online to see the reaction? “I’m chronically online, oops!” she laughs. “I saw one person took a screenshot and was like, ‘King Harper!’… What else are people saying?” I, slightly embarrassed, tell her that some commentators were, ahem, frustrated that the strap-on scene in particular was too brief. “Oh my God,” she scoffs, throwing her head back. “Like they need more intimacy on Industry? We do our fair share! The audience can’t be greedy!”
She’s right: you definitely don’t want to watch this show with your parents. But the sex in Industry isn’t gratuitous, either. “It’s not sex for sex’s sake,” says Myha’la. “There’s actually a lot of plot that happens in our intimacy scenes, particularly this season. Sex and power go hand in hand.”
When it comes to filming these scenes, Myha’la has strict boundaries about how her body is captured to ensure she feels safe. “If I’m in motion, I say no to a wide shot that includes my head and feet – top to tail – in the same frame. I also say no to shooting pubic hair,” she says. This way, the crew is required to get creative with the angles. “That’s the way I protect myself right now, but the amazing thing about the growing industry of intimacy coordinators being a requirement now… thank God… is that you have so much more agency and freedom to change your mind at any point.”
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Intimacy coordinators make things infinitely more comfortable. But it still felt wrong when she filmed her first sex scene after getting engaged to her now-husband, the actor Armando Rivera, in 2024 (the pair, who first met when he messaged her via Instagram DMs, secretly got married in their New York apartment last year). “It was so bizarre,” she says. “I’ve always been open and willing to try things [on set], a kiss is a kiss. I’m usually really good at compartmentalising that this is work.” But suddenly, kissing felt like a step too far. “Maybe there was something that felt sacred about kissing, like no one else can have a kiss from me,” she says with a furrowed brow.
Luckily, Rivera is an “incredibly secure man” who understands the trade (he proposed wearing a T-shirt printed with Myha’la’s face, after all). She admits her work on the series can elicit mixed reactions from the audience. “People talk about it pretty aggressively,” she says. “Sometimes, people are not very nice about it and not very nice about him, which is so sad, but he takes it all in his stride. He’s so understanding.” It helps, too, that Rivera has become like part of the Industry family – he was hanging out on set with Myha’la a lot through seasons three and four. “He feels like he’s a part of the fabric of the show,” she says. “He just gets it.”
Aside from the boatload of sex, Industry is also steeped in politics. Kay and Down don’t shy away from addressing that we are living in a post-woke society. In season four’s first three episodes alone, Harper is openly referred to as an “angry Black woman”; she’s tossed out as her aristocrat’s diversity hire, as he delivers the haunting line: “Yesterday, I called my assistant a r***** and nobody flinched. Tomorrow, I might do it again.” Meanwhile, Abela’s Yasmin is happily doing business with Austrian Nazis (they have a portrait signed by Hitler in the guest room).
Myha’la says there has been a “360 degree shift” in social attitudes between 2021 and 2023. “The rollback of anybody’s give-a-s*** was so intense, and I think is what the show is reflecting, which has also been my experience in life.” The political climate, she says, has given people “permission to be assholes, and they’ll do it really loudly because they no longer fear the consequences. Unfortunately, people are emboldened by an insane f***-off American president and a bunch of other terrible bad actors around the world who are like right-wing conservatives and who don’t care about anyone’s feelings, which is really sad.” Later in the series, it comes as little surprise when a Maga hat-wearing Trump figure shows up on the same golf course as Harper’s business partner, Eric.
It was tricky being one of the few Americans on Industry’s Cardiff set just months after Trump had come back into office in 2025. “I felt a strange kind of guilt that I had this amazing distraction,” Myha’la tells me. “And then my friends at home would be like, ‘Oh, I’m doing this protest or I’m doing this.’ I felt sad that I couldn’t be there supporting them.” Surrounded by Brits, she started to feel like the spokesperson for the entirety of the United States. “Everyone was like, how do you feel?” she puts on an overzealous accent, holding up an imaginary microphone in my direction.
“‘How do you feel about such and such? You must feel this, blah blah blah.’ I was like, I don’t represent all of America! Although the UK is calling the kettle black,” she laughs. “They were very much like, how does it feel to be the laughing stock of the world? It was bizarre.”
She takes great pride in how she conducts herself on the Industry set. Being No 1 on the call sheet carries a big responsibility – especially when it comes to setting the tone for each day. It’s a lesson she learnt from Julia Roberts, her co-star on Netflix’s 2023 apocalypse thriller, Leave The World Behind. Myha’la says Roberts was completely gracious on set, “incredibly kind,” and remembered the names of the cast and crew as she greeted them each day. “I was like, wow, I want people to look at me the way they look at Julia – as somebody who has such an amazing career and works extremely hard but also has the energy to make sure that the vibe of the whole production is really uplifting.”
Myha’la recalls going full hype-woman when she put this into practice. The Industry cast had just made the gruelling shift from overnight shoots to regular daytime hours for the filming of the new season. “The AD was like, ‘Good morning everyone,’ and everyone was like….” Myha’la mumbles unenthusiastically into her mug. “I was like, ‘Oh hell no, that is not how we’re starting this week!’” she says, her voice climbing to a higher, squeakier register. “‘I need y’all to be excited to be at work today. He said, ‘Good morning!’ What are y’all going to say?’ I literally interrupted the whole thing… we couldn’t start the day that way.” She understands her responsibility as the show’s lead. “If I’m in a s*** mood, it really affects the whole set. So I always try to come in with a smile on my face and the energy to get the party started.”
After all, Myha’la has worked hard to get here. There’s no holding back now. “I want my crew to be happy. And if I understand that I can influence someone’s day, why would I not do that?” she says. “I know everyone’s tired, but we’re at this place we’re so lucky to be at.” The angel cards are working in her favour, clearly. I open my phone and order myself a deck.
‘Industry’ season four continues on Mondays on BBC One at 10.40pm in the UK and Sundays at 9pm ET on HBO/HBO Max in the US
