“Yasmin and Hayley have an incredible amount of chemistry, but Hayley is not to be trusted.”
Photo: HBO
The season-three finale of Industry teased a drastic reset of the provocative HBO finance drama, and season four immediately delivers on that promise: Pierpoint is out, and in is Tender, a former porn payment processor that’s being refashioned as a bank. The premiere’s opening moments follow Kiernan Shipka’s Hayley, a Tender employee out for a drug-fueled night on the town. At a club, she meets a man (Charlie Heaton) who has been following her and brings him home; in the morning, she freaks out when he confesses he’s a journalist investigating Tender. Episode three, “Habseligkeiten,” raises the stakes for the new character even higher when Hayley entangles herself in the precarious marriage between Tender’s new CEO, Henry Muck (Kit Harington), and Yasmin (Marisa Abela), culminating in a steamy and power-shifting threesome. “You look around like, where am I? How have all my life choices led up to this particular moment?” Shipka says of filming the encounter in a castle in Wales. “I got the full Industry experience.”
After last week’s installment toured the broken psyche of Henry within his marriage to Yasmin, “Habseligkeiten” has the couple officially coming onboard at Tender. Henry is helping co-founder Whitney (Max Minghella) work to get the proper approvals and deals for the company’s transition into banking, and when a disgruntled Austrian lord puts that in jeopardy, the Tender team heads to his estate to win him over. During their night there, Hayley, who serves as Henry and Whitney’s shared assistant, brings documents to the couple’s room. Yasmin senses an opportunity and lures Hayley into the bedroom just as Henry walks by in a towel, then pushes Henry to have sex with Hayley while Yasmin watches. “When I read it, I did have the immediate thought of, oh, people are gonna talk about this,” says 26-year-old Shipka, who’s been acting since she was 6 years old and got her break on Mad Men before transitioning to roles in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Twisters. “I don’t often think about my work in that way, but it was really exciting to be a part of a show that is so reckless and bold.”
What was it about Hayley that attracted you to her?
I auditioned with a scene from episode one and another scene with Yasmin, and I was like, what is this character? Who is this girl? I mean, she seems pretty wild and a little psycho, in a way I can get down with.
The casting director says that they thought of you for Hayley because it goes completely against what audiences have seen you in. Is that a big reason why you wanted to do it?
There was something really thrilling about playing against type. People have known me since I was 6 years old, and I’m aware of the fact that there’s a lot of associations with me in that timeframe. To get to do something that felt very aligned with being in my mid-20s was really exciting.
What has the transition from child actor to teen actor to now an adult actor, and not just an adult playing teen roles, been like? I think this show and character is probably the best way to officially declare yourself as an adult actor.
A full indoctrination! I’ve loved my career, and I don’t ever feel like I was in a major rush to get to the next phase. I look back and feel really lucky that I got to play through the different phases of my life. Everything has sort of met me where I’ve been at, and now being 26 and getting to jump in with these guys and do this sort of stuff, the timing has felt right. I’m really glad that my 20s have shook out the way they have, because I think I needed to go out there and live my own life and do a little research for that club scene. [Laughs.] I feel like I can bring my adult self to parts now because I’ve been an adult for an amount of time where it doesn’t feel like I’m stretching. There was a moment in my life where I went, Wait, no, I need to know what it’s like to be an adult so that I can bring it back into my work. And I feel like I’ve gotten a chance to do that, and it was helpful for Hayley.
Speaking of that season-opening club scene, there’s this incredible vibe between you and Charlie onscreen, but I imagine shooting something like that isn’t as fun as it looks.
We were in an actual club, and friends of the show’s creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, were actually DJing. To play someone who’s intoxicated and loose and free, I felt like all the rules went out the window. We could just try stuff. When it’s a heavy dialogue scene, there’s so many different things that you’re considering and want to convey, but just act drunk and the rest is gonna handle itself. Rehearsal was awkward. The lights are still up, and everyone’s like, “So you’re gonna just grind on each other here,” and you’re like, Um, let’s get the lights down, get the strobes going, and we’ll do it.
Hayley and Yasmin’s chemistry is there from the minute they meet in episode two — was it the same for you and Marisa?
It’s funny, I sat next to her at a dinner a year ago, and I remember her talking about filming the show, and I’m like, “Oh, that sounds fun.” You never know where life will take you. She’s such an easy person to get along with. Yasmin and Hayley’s chemistry is one of the most fun parts about the relationship, because there are power plays happening the whole time, and so there’s not a lot of trust in their relationship. But I do think it’s built on chemistry, just this powerful thing they have from the get-go.
What’s your first thought or question when you learn about the threesome?
My question was, what’s her long game? Like, what does she want, and what is she doing there? Because in most of the scenes she’s in, there’s an ulterior motive that is unclear until later in the season. It was really important for me to know what that motive was, and what she was trying to accomplish in any given scene, because I wanted it all to track. I was reading each script a couple times because there’s so much subtext.
Were there any nerves going in?
Yeah, I can’t say that I’ve done a three-way in a castle before. [Laughs.] I wasn’t nervous for that part of it at all; I was very concerned with what she was trying to do and how she was going to use that moment later. And every character in that scene is going through it in their own kind of way.
The power dynamics are constantly shifting throughout that scene. Were you conscious of that while filming it?
We talked about it from a choreographic perspective, like, what would make the most sense when it came to the physical elements of the scene? Everyone was kind of doing their own individual thing at the same time, and it was fun to watch back because there was stuff that I missed on the day. But when I actually watched it, I was able to see Marisa while I’m making out with Henry, and Yasmin’s on a journey. She has this incredible arc throughout the whole scene and kind of gets her power back.
Henry is the only one who seems to regret what went down, later telling Hayley to skip out on Yasmin’s proposed “nightcap” after they’ve returned to London. Moving forward, how would you say that dynamic is affected?
For Hayley, I think the three-way was a, Let’s see what I can do with this. Like, let’s get some raw materials and see how I can work with them after. I think it does give her a stronger hand, and that’s really what she’s able to use when asserting her own power with Yasmin. The questions raised about that scene and the remnants of that night are very pervasive throughout the season, and one thing that really carried on is that sense of trust, or lack thereof. Yasmin and Hayley have an incredible amount of chemistry, but Hayley is not to be trusted.
We’ve mostly seen Hayley in a work environment or around her bosses, even if their activities are not very HR-friendly. The only time she’s been shown outside of that is in the opening of the season. I was curious if you thought that the Hayley who goes off on Jim when she learns of his identity and threatens him with a knife and her “big” and “Black” boyfriend is the most in line with who she truly is?
I think that was a more raw version of her. In that moment we got to see an animalistic, aggressive, reactive Hayley. Throughout the rest of the season, she’s really calculated and doing everything according to a playbook she’s written for herself. But that was not part of any sort of agenda, and it’s a very impulsive thing she does. To see the way that it throws her, I think that’s closer to the real her. The crazy thing is, even though that is one of the few moments in her arc that catches her off guard, she still figures out how to use it to her advantage. And that’s kind of her ethos, to make anything work for her. She’s making lemonade — and she is probably spiking it with something.
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