‘Industry’: Myha’la & Marisa Abela Explain Why Harper & Yasmin Are Inseparable

Harper and Yasmin are the emotional center of Industry. Through every feud, every biting remark, there’s an emotional connection that keeps their friendship going. No one understands Harper and Yasmin like Harper and Yasmin, except for the actors who play them, Myha’la and Marisa Abela. Ahead of the Industry Season 4 premiere, we asked the stars to share their favorite things about each other’s characters.

Harper and Yasmin met in Industry Season 1, when they were both new employees at the now-defunct Pierpoint & Co. financial group. They each have intense emotional baggage from their respective family traumas, and they share a desire to ignore how those things are really affecting them (their fast-paced, high-financial stakes careers help them keep their emotions buried as well, or so they think).

The women have had their feuds throughout the series, but they always come back to each other. In Industry Season 4, they’re holding their own in their separate careers, but their paths are destined to collide again — with the great Ken Leung back in the mix as Eric Tao, Harper and Yas’s former Pierpoint superior — igniting the biggest conflict viewers have seen so far in this gripping HBO drama that has more than earned its coveted Sundays at 9/8c timeslot.

Abela explains why Harper and Yasmin keep coming back to each other.

“History, being seen by the other person,” she says. “As you grow up and grow up so drastically like these two have, and in such separate worlds, the new people that you meet along the way don’t necessarily have any context for who you are and why you are the way you are. Whereas what Yasmin is for Harper is context.”

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“It’s nice, even though she didn’t enjoy it at the time; it’s nice that when Yasmin looks at Harper, she knows she’s seeing not just her now, but who she has always been,” Abela goes on. “And it’s a good reminder, I think, for Yasmin to not completely lose sight of who she has always been.”

“My favorite thing about Yasmin is her relentlessness. She just refuses to give up on this man, Henry [Kit Harington],” Myha’la tells TV Insider. “If I were her girl, I’d be like, ‘Girl, you’re a wife, not a mother.’ But she runs that man and is the reason for his success, so I say, ‘More power to you.’ And the way that she manages to big-up herself, get herself in the rooms, and put these people together. She continues to make herself relevant, which I think is neat.”

“My favorite thing about Harper is just how brilliant she is at her job,” adds Abela. “I think that she’s a super impressive young woman [who] just gets sh*t done and always makes people money. It’s f***ing cool.”

In Industry Season 4, Harper and Yasmin are at the top of their game and living the lives they set out to have as Pierpoint grads. They’re drawn into a high-stakes, globetrotting cat-and-mouse game when a splashy fintech darling bursts onto the London scene. As Yasmin navigates her relationship with tech founder Sir Henry Muck and Harper is pulled into the orbit of enigmatic executive Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), their twisted friendship begins to warp and ignite under the pressure of money, power, and the desire to be on top.

Industry, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO