This season, one of the central questions that Harper is starting to ask herself is whether or not she’s a psychopath. What’s it like playing a character like that? “That’s one of the things I love about her, that she is actually now asking herself that question,” Myha’la says. “I feel like regular people ask themselves all the time, Am I a bad person?”
In 2024, Industry’s third season was its breakthrough moment. Watching the show, it seemed Down and Kay really honed in on what they were trying to say. And as a result, the show became more daring, elevated, and cinematic, with Kit Harington joining the cast. In the US, season three was placed in HBO’s coveted Sunday-night slot, traditionally occupied by discourse-shaping shows such as Succession and Game of Thrones.
As a story of two “survivor” women, the show has also developed a vocal queer fandom, who generate a constant stream of memes, thirst posts, and Charli XCX fan-cam videos. Abela is thrilled when I tell her that, as one such queer fan with a propensity for diva worship, I would personally follow Yasmin into battle. “Your fans are mostly the gays, I feel like?” Myha’la says, and Abela agrees: “I have a lot of gay men — and you have a lot of gay women.”
If the approval of the most important tastemakers (gay people) wasn’t enough, The New Yorker had crowned Industry as the best TV show of 2024, with the show dominating critics’ year-end lists, from Vanity Fair to Vulture and The Guardian. In May, Abela also won the 2025 Leading Actress TV BAFTA for her work on season three. Still, despite all this (deserved) praise and Abela’s (deserved) BAFTA win, the show didn’t receive many award nominations elsewhere — including zero at the 2025 Emmys. What gives?
“Thank you!” they say, almost in unison, when I point out the snub. “The truth is that the audience isn’t huge, in terms of the shows that do get that recognition,” Abela says. “What I’m so proud of is that Industry punches so high above its weight for the number of people that watch it. You look at the stats on something like The White Lotus or Succession compared to us, but then we’re on all the same lists.” Myha’la points out that some of the most beloved shows of all time, like HBO’s The Wire, didn’t win many awards, and also that the cast being mostly based in the UK probably doesn’t help with awards-season politics. “We don’t have much of a presence in Hollywood,” she says. “I think there’s a bit of a disconnect between the industry at large and Industry.” As someone who has watched the show’s momentum grow, I think it will end up exemplifying the eternal Samantha Jones quote: “First come the gays, then the girls — then the industry.”
Myha’la and Abela’s upbringings could hardly have been more different from London’s cut-throat finance world. Myha’la grew up in San Jose, California, as Myha’la Jael Herrold-Morgan. In 2023, she dropped the name Herrold professionally, saying that her first name feels more representative of her. She’s very close with her mother, Susan, who worked in a beauty salon and whose eclectic closet first piqued her interest in fashion. (Myha’la attended the 2025 Met Gala in an homage to Black Dandyism that was custom-designed by Luar’s Raul Lopez.) As a self-identified theater kid, she started performing in community plays aged six. And in 2017, the year before she graduated from drama school, she landed a role in a touring production of The Book of Mormon. Will we hear her singing soon? “Of course, one day.” she says. “I mean, my dream is to make my Broadway debut.”
In contrast, Abela grew up in Rottingdean, a village near Brighton on England’s south coast. Her father, a comedian and director, is of Maltese and Arab descent. And her mother, who is still a working actor, is from a Jewish background with Polish ancestry. They split up when she was four. It’s a background that, on paper, might predispose her to nepo baby allegations, but it’s more nuanced than that. “I grew up with no money from a single-parent family, and I got a scholarship to a very, very prestigious private school — an all-girls boarding school,” she explains. “I remember girls would come over to my house and just laugh at how small it was.”
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