Not only did the third season of “Industry” broaden the scope of the London-set finance show, it also expanded Marisa Abela’s character, Yasmin Kara-Hanani. Her tumultuous arc was as dramatically compelling for the audience as it was for Abela herself.
“It’s incredible that [creators] Mickey [Down] and Konrad [Kay] did what they did for Yasmin,” Abela says, speaking over Zoom during production of the HBO drama’s fourth season. “At the time, you’re excited as an actor and you’re in it and you’re doing it, and there’s so much to do each day as it comes. But, retrospectively, it was such a gift to have had that season. It will always be one of my favorite challenges as an actor.”
Abela began shooting Season 3 only a week after wrapping the Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black,” which required a difficult physical transformation and extensive prep. She says returning to “Industry” so quickly felt like “another big mountain to climb,” although not necessarily in a bad way.
“Being an actor is like being an athlete, and I was definitely warm after ‘Back to Black,’” she says. “So it actually helped in the end.”
Season 3 opened with Yasmin’s abusive father, Charles (Adam Levy), disappearing off the family yacht. After returning to London, Yasmin finds herself trailed by paparazzi — an unexpected parallel with Winehouse — and dogged by his legal problems. By the end of the season, it’s revealed that Charles fell off the boat and Yasmin was too shocked to save him, forcing Harper (Myha’la) to help cover up her part in his death. The challenge for Abela was to balance Yasmin’s emotional trauma with everything else going on, including her on-again, off-again relationship with Robert (Harry Lawtey) and her faltering career at Pierpoint under her boss Eric (Ken Leung).
“There were multiple storylines happening at the same time as the biggest seismic event that has happened in her life,” Abela says. “It was about holding the truth of all of those things at once. The instinct is to play the truth of the scene at that very moment. So if I’m asking Eric to take me seriously and give me more responsibility at work, what I don’t want to be playing is, ‘My dad’s dead.’ But the truth is her dad is dead and she’s being hounded by the paparazzi, and those are feeding into what she’s saying. It was definitely a balancing act.”
Because Yasmin is now an established character, Abela feels confident letting the viewer do more of the work. “The audience has watched Yasmin construct who she wants the world to see her as,” Abela says. “I think of Yasmin as this fortress now, but the audience are inside the walls of the fortress. The audience knows when she’s lying. The audience knows when she’s insecure. The audience knows when something’s going to hit a nerve.”
One of the most memorable scenes is a fight between Yasmin and Harper, which culminates with them slapping each other. Abela says the actors were “so excited” when they got the script. They discussed the scene over the phone and played it multiple times without cutting once on set. “They let us go, and we just kept doing it,” Abela remembers. “We found more and more each time.” Despite the intensity of the fight, Abela calls it “the best kind of day” because it revolves around “a piece of text you can fully get behind.” She understood both Yasmin and Harper’s motivation and never felt she had to justify anything as the actor. “Their goal was to try and hurt the other one,” Abela says. “When the objective of the scene is to burn the bridge, you can really go for it. It was like, ‘Let’s nail each other to the wall.’”
By the end of season, Yasmin has married wealthy socialite Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) in an attempt to save her reputation. In true “Industry” fashion, it’s a cliffhanger that will change the landscape again in Season 4. “Imagine living in that house with Henry all of a sudden after the season that she had,” Abela says, laughing. “Imagine Yasmin now just living in the countryside forever. Surely the audience knows that’s not going to happen.”
Abela says Down and Kay always hold themselves accountable for how they end a season, a mindset that ensures each year concludes with an upset of the status quo. “They’re writing every season as if they want to go out with a bang, which is why it’s really compelling,” Abela says. “They’re writing the reality of these people’s lives in the most ferocious way they can, and I really respect that from them. It bleeds into our work. With writing of that intensity you have no choice but to match it.”
The actor is midway through shooting Season 4, which will likely premiere in 2026. She describes it as “a culmination of that finance stuff of Season 1 and the drama stuff of Season 3.” Although Yasmin has left Pierpoint, Abela says the “world of finance is huge” and there may still be opportunity for the character to flourish. “Yasmin’s skill set really lies in getting people to do what it is that she wants them to do,” Abela says. “She needs a lot more control than making a phone call and saying, ‘Do you want me to sell you a couple of stocks?’”
Although Abela recently won leading actress at the BAFTA TV Awards, her favorite accolade has come from Anthony Scaramucci. The former White House communications director described Yasmin to the show’s creators as “the Tony Soprano of young women.”
“I never know what she’s going to be doing and how she’s going to be behaving, and I never feel like I’m doing the same thing twice,” she says. “She’s so much fun, whether she’s being good or evil.”
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