Marisa Abela
(Picture: Evening Standard)“If I’m on my own, it’s dark out, I’m walking down the street and it’s a group of guys who are like ‘that’s Yasmin!’ — that can freak me out sometimes. I guess because I’m aware of the nature of the show, and in season one, for Yasmin, there was quite a lot of nudity.” Marisa Abela, 25, one of the stars of cult drama Industry, still isn’t used to being “spotted”.
It is a testament to the very particular level of fame she is at — not a household name, but recognisable enough to make the odd trip to Tesco eventful. But if the amount of Hollywood heat on her is anything to go by, her star is on the rise: Abela has just finished shooting on Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie film, alongside Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
She is also rumoured to be in the running to play Amy Winehouse in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic, Back to Black (Abela is tongue-tied when I ask her about the latter: “Yeah, no, I mean, it’s… it’s all… Yeah, rumours. You know? I’m a big fan. It would be amazing. But you know, who knows?”). And of course, there is the triumphant return of Industry, the second season of which premiered in the UK on Tuesday.
The show has been called the missing link between Succession and Euphoria — a Gen Z workplace drama set in the City, following a new generation as they grapple with the corrupting forces of an Ultra High Net Worth world. “The premise has built-in drama,” says Abela. “It’s inherently high stakes, when you’re talking about that much money.”
Like Succession, the action, which mainly takes place on the trading floor of fictional bank Pierpoint & Co, is a vehicle for a Shakespearean exploration of power in its varying guises: wealth, most obviously — but also class, privilege and sex. Abela’s character Yasmin — an heiress to a publishing fortune, desperate to shake off the shackles of her name and the accusations of nepotism that follow her through her working life — embodies basically all of these.
In the first season, her narrative arc revolves around an sado-masochistic affair with a colleague. The nudity was more “anxiety inducing” the first time around, she explains: “It’s a very exposing thing to do… I was worried that people would pick apart my body, I was worried that people would be cruel or on the opposite end of the spectrum that they might enjoy it too much and think they had a right to it.”
She’s aware, she explains, that once something is “out there” it no longer belongs to her — “once that final edit is signed off, the show belongs to the audience. So when your naked body is a part of that, it’s a weird thing to wrap your head around.” This, she says, is where the very small frisson of fear comes from, if encountering groups of male fans alone at night. “Not that it happens like that very often or that anyone’s been weird,” she assures me, with a smile.
Still, back in July, ahead of the second season’s release in the US (where it has been rapturously received by audiences and critics alike), she told one interviewer: “I had quite serious conversations with them [the writers] about nudity. It’s still there and a part of the show, but this season I had a bit more leverage.” It reminds me of Emilia Clarke: an unknown when Game of Thrones started but by the time the third season aired, it was rumoured that she’d put a ban on nudity — allegedly proclaiming “I want to be known for my acting, not my breasts”.
When I ask Abela whether it was a conscious decision to do fewer nude scenes this time around, she is sanguine, explaining that Yasmin’s narrative arc in the second season revolves around her relationship with her father and so simply required less sex and nudity. “So no, it wasn’t an intentional thing. And actually, I think once I ripped the band aid off — and I did that in season one — I wasn’t so scared of it any more.”
It is interesting to talk to Abela after having binged almost the entirety of Industry’s second season in less than 24 hours. There’s a reason she has been called the “breakout star” of the show; Yasmin is a particularly mercurial character, switching between breathless people-pleasing and arch manipulation within the space of a few micro expressions. Abela’s ability to convey the shifting power dynamics within any given scene without even uttering a word is mesmerising to watch.
In real life she comes across as warm, attentive and thoughtful; she peppers her answers with “likes” and “oh my gods” (of Gosling, for instance: “I was like, ‘Oh my god, like, that is a proper superstar”), which make her seem much more open and guileless than her on-screen character. She points out that this is all very new to her, after all she only graduated from Rada in 2019, and Industry — the pilot of which was directed by Lena Dunham — was her first proper job.
Working with Dunham, she says, remains a career highlight (“I grew up watching Girls, I think she’s a genius”). It was also her first brush with Hollywood. “I was still at drama school when I was auditioning for the part. And they asked us to give a nod to the character in whatever we wore to the audition — so I went in a silk shirt that had feathers all around the sleeves. I immediately walked in and had to be like ‘guys, I’m sorry, these feathers just keep moulting.’” Dunham laughed it off. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, I was at the Met Gala last week wearing feathers and they got everywhere.’ The Met Gala! I was really starstruck by her, and starstruck by how intimate our working relationship became — she would be like, ‘Oh, Brad Pitt just sent me a text’. I remember being shocked Brad Pitt is actually a real person.”
Being on the set of the Barbie film must have been mind-bending, then. “Oh absolutely — I felt starstruck by Ryan [Gosling],” she says. The thing about Margot Robbie, she explains, “is that she’s so nice, that you almost immediately forget how much of a star she is… not that Ryan isn’t nice, but I didn’t have as much to do with him. So whenever I saw him around, I was just like ‘f***, wow.’”
The attention Abela has received for Industry has been a “wild ride”, she says, because it was so unexpected. She was brought up in Brighton by her mum (her parents separated when she was four) Caroline Gruber, a theatre actress. “My mum was always like, ‘if you can do anything else, do it — because this is hard,’” says Abela. During her daughter’s school years, Gruber worked in a call centre, writing scripts for charities to make ends meet.
“So, it wasn’t like I grew up with my mother being a dame of the theatre — and in a way, it was a much more realistic view of what a jobbing actor’s life looks like.” Abela’s “sensible” back-up career would have been law, she explains. “For university, I applied to UCL and my mum and I went on an open day.” Rada was just down the road. “Mum was like, ‘don’t you just want to go there? Wouldn’t that be so much better?’ And the truth was that yes, that was definitely what I wanted to do.”
So she auditioned and got in — forearmed with an insight into what life in the theatre was like for most actors. “I never started this job expecting to become some kind of superstar — and that is still so far from anything I’ve envisioned. I just love acting.”
The week we talk, the Prime Minister has lifted the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Industry is regularly praised for its accurate depiction of life in the City and Abela points out one of the most interesting aspects for her has been “peeking behind the curtain” of this rarefied world. She grew up in the wake of the 2008 financial crash — and the demonisation of the bankers which went with it — and thinks the show humanises the people working in the banking industry because “you do get to understand that it is genuinely hard work”.
But for Abela personally, the removal of the cap on bonuses left a bitter aftertaste. “It’s hard to ignore the fact that we’ve just been through a pandemic, and we’ve seen NHS workers do the most ungodly hours, in the most ungodly conditions — and their pay rise was so minimal. It feels like all they got was a clap every Thursday.” She adds, diplomatically, that “it’s not for me to say who deserves what” but concludes that “the priorities in this country are all the way messed up.”
She’s reluctant to be drawn further on her politics because she doesn’t think she’s in a position where her political views are particularly relevant. “People don’t need to be told how to feel by someone on a TV show,” she says. It’s a fair point, though the themes Industry deals with do lend themselves to these kinds of conversations. For what it’s worth Abela’s view’s aren’t very Pierpoint-appropriate: Liz Truss should concentrate on funding things like renewable energy — “I’m obviously very scared about climate change, as everyone should be” — instead of “funnelling any more money into the pockets of billionaires”.
