New York — Most of the time, Kiernan Shipka isn’t thinking about how fans are going to react to a scene when she’s reading scripts. And she’s had practice. Shipka got her start when she was just 6 years old on “Mad Men,” a series filled with the kind of jaw-dropping sequences made for water cooler conversation.
But when Shipka read the wild menage a trois her character Haley has in the third episode of Season 4 of “Industry,” which aired Sunday, she knew it was going to explode on the internet. “I looked at that scene and went, yeah, that’s going to get people talking,” she deadpans in the HBO offices one January afternoon, before breaking out into a giggle.
At 26 years old, Shipka has grown up onscreen. On AMC’s “Mad Men” we watched her, as Sally Draper, turn from an adorable little girl to an angsty youth, well aware of her father’s transgressions. Shortly after, Shipka graduated to playing the title teenage witch in Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” But even she admits that her role on the buzzy HBO drama feels like a turning point in her already long career.
“I wasn’t necessarily saying at the beginning of last year I wanted to play something that’s more mature and more adult, but I think I did,” she says. “I think deep down I wanted to do something that felt more in-line with being what 25 at the time felt like to me. I felt like a person who was an adult in the world and I wanted to play one.”
Kiernan Shipka as Haley in Season 4 of “Industry.”
(Simon Ridgway/HBO)
But Haley also isn’t exactly an easy nut to crack, which is what makes Shipka’s performance so intriguing. Three episodes in and we still don’t exactly know what her deal is. She works for Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), the founder of Tender, an app that has aspirations for being a bank in your pocket despite its history as a payment processor for OnlyFans-type porn sites. Haley is a party girl, whose job is seemingly to follow Whitney around, booking his cabs, travel and perhaps more nefarious dealings.
But Haley is also savvy, especially when it comes to sex, and she finds an opening when Yasmin (Marisa Abela) invites her into her bedroom while they are staying at an Austrian castle for some important schmoozing with the fascist owner of a bank. (The castle, for what it’s worth, was actually located in Wales.) Yasmin encourages Haley to get it on with her husband Henry Muck (Kit Harington), the CEO of Tender, before asking Haley to spread her legs. Then she joins in herself. (Yes, this does mean that Sally Draper and Jon Snow are making out onscreen; No, Shipka hadn’t met Harington before when they were on their former long-running TV shows.) As is tradition for “Industry,” the scene is provocative but it’s about more than just titillation: As Haley and Yasmin watch each other, you can see a game of one-upmanship unfolding. It’s just unclear exactly what cards someone like Haley is holding.
“I think she knows how powerful sex is,” Shipka says. “She knows that because of her own experience and going into that situation, whatever the outcome of it ends up being, I think she has in her head: ‘This is probably going to be good for me.’”
Haley is a new type of character for “Industry” co-creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down. Unlike pretty much everyone else on screen, she’s not spewing a bunch of financial jargon. They knew they wanted to cast an American and the idea of hiring a “Mad Men” alum was incredibly appealing, considering they are huge fans.
In “Industry,” Shipka’s character Haley shares a provocative scene with Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Henry (Kit Harington). “I think she knows how powerful sex is,” Shipka says. (Justin Jun Lee/For The Times)
“There was a cosmic circularity in having Don Draper’s daughter do all this crazy stuff,” Down says, adding, “It’s exciting to take an actor that you wouldn’t expect to be in a show like this and sort of put them through the wringer.”
When Shipka met with Down and Kay over Zoom, she played Haley, who is introduced during a night out clubbing, very drunk. Her voice was very raspy. Down didn’t know whether she was going Method.
It was actually a twist of fate. The meeting fell during awards season and Shipka had been going out a lot and lost her voice. (Shipka was in last season’s contender “The Last Showgirl” alongside Pamela Anderson.) “This is not my usual way,” she says, breaking out into laughter. “I answered this Zoom call and it sounded like I’d been partying all night.”
It was exactly right for Haley, though. Over the course of the season, just what exactly Haley’s deal is becomes clearer, which allowed Shipka to layer elements of her character into the scenes. Still, her slipperiness was something that attracted the actor. Haley is someone who seemingly doesn’t have a lot of power and yet acts as a “power player.”
“I was really interested in someone who looks at their situation and goes, ‘I’m going to leverage everything,’” Shipka says. “‘I’m going to weaponize what I can. I’m going to scratch my way no matter what. Everything’s a game.’ It’s so opposite to how I think and how I move about life that I was so enticed by the way she moved about the world.”
And how does Shipka herself move about the world? With a sense of joy that’s palpable even in the drab office space where we’re conducting our interview. Wearing a black-and-white ensemble that bares her midriff, she tucks her feet under her and treats our chat like a gab session. The next night when we say hello at the “Industry” premiere party, the celebratory environment is much more suited to her aura.
Haley is a character who leverages everything, Shipka says. “It’s so opposite to how I think and how I move about life that I was so enticed by the way she moved about the world.”
(Justin Jun Lee/For The Times)
While playing Sally in “Mad Men” was like “going to school,” in the years following the show, Shipka started to figure out what worked for her when it came to acting. She started to determine what kind of coaching she liked, and how she wanted to do backstories for her character. The question of whether she wanted to stick with this profession came up from time to time as she was getting older. “But not for longer than like five minutes, honestly,” she says.
She explains she was talking to her mother recently, wondering what she would have done if “Mad Men” hadn’t happened. “I kind of thought about it and got really terrified and a little sad,” she says. “Because I really do feel like this is what I’m meant to be doing and I don’t know how it would have found me if it didn’t happen so early.”
But Shipka is also not nostalgic for the past.
“I think there’s something to be said for frontal lobe development,” she says. “I think my work got more fun the more fun I had in my life, and the more not fun I had in my life, too. My work got better the more that I just lived my life.”
Before the pandemic, she was working all the time on “Sabrina,” which wrapped right before lockdown. Emerging from that, she found a group of friends whom she adores. She went to parties and got heartbroken and had the kind of human experiences that she could funnel into her craft. “I found myself in a lot of really funny situations,” she says. “And also I went on my own ‘Who am I?’ journey, did my therapy, read my self help books.”
Shipka, who began acting on “Mad Men” at 6, says it’s what she’s meant to do. “I don’t know how it would have found me if it didn’t happen so early.”
(Justin Jun Lee/For The Times)
When Shipka was filming “Industry,” which mostly shoots in Wales, she could have gone home multiple times when she wasn’t needed. Instead, she went to London and had herself a “U.K. Girl Summer,” as she says, hitting up Glastonbury where she saw Father John Misty and Charli XCX.
“I felt like I got to live in the U.K., and there was something so fun about that,” she says.
Down describes Shipka as “the nicest person” he’s probably ever met, who was game for just about everything.
“There were a few days where she actually was sort of a glorified extra, right in the background of the shot, working on Whitney’s desk, pretending to type,” he says. “She was background for the whole day and just sat there, not one single complaint.”
She also nailed all of Haley’s nuances, from her naivete to her titillation, including all the character beats in her big sex scene. “It was a very raw, vulnerable scene for an actor to do,” Kay says. “She brought a lot of herself to it in more ways than one. Both me and Mickey are really proud of that scene. I think it’s one of the strongest sex scenes we’ve done in the four seasons of ‘Industry.’”
For Shipka, it was her true indoctrination into this wild world.
“I felt like I was really in the show by that point,” she says. “I was super down.”
