With its bracing season finale on Sunday night, Industry has wrapped up its most bonkers, heart-racing chapter yet. And, boy, is that saying something: The drugged-up, sexually charged, 20-something bankers at its center have been getting into high-wire shenanigans—ranging from adultery to insider trading—since the show premiered in 2020. (That said, with HBO’s green light on season four, we’re sure that creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down will find a way to outdo themselves.)
While there are no bad performances on Industry—and this latest season yielded especially dynamic turns from the likes of Harry Lawtey, Ken Leung, and Sagar Radia—Marisa Abela has emerged as the cast’s standout. Her restrained and nuanced turn as Yasmin Kara-Hanani has kept the show grounded, even as Down and Kay keep swinging for the fences.
For those in need of a recap: After Yasmin’s philandering father, Charles Hanani (Adam Levy), embezzles from his publishing house and then mysteriously vanishes from his boat, the British media sics the paparazzi on Yas, dubbing her the Embezzler Heiress. When Charles later turns up dead, Yasmin is forced to either take the fall for his misconduct or go broke trying to clear her name. Meanwhile, she’s still downright bad at her job, having returned to the trading floor at Pierpoint from a doomed stint in private wealth management. Though Yas finds a new workplace mentor in Eric (Leung), he also brings a slimy, sexual undercurrent to their dynamic that would make HR’s eyes bulge.
Not all hope is lost for Yas, though. After three seasons of edging, Robert (Lawtey) and Yasmin finally consummate their will-they-or-won’t-they relationship. But just when you think these two can finally give it a real go, Yasmin chooses self-preservation over love and agrees to marry man-child CEO Henry Muck (a delightful Kit Harrington)—a move that will keep the press off her back (Henry’s uncle is a British newspaper magnate), save her from financial ruin, and make her friends in high places. As Robert prepares to drive off, leaving Yasmin with Henry, he and Yasmin exchange a heart-shattering final look.
It would be impossible to discuss Abela’s performance this season—and throughout the show—without talking about sex, which, for Yasmin, is inextricable from power. Yasmin is siren-esque, using sex as a tool to dominate, placate, and ascend—but she’s also subjected to men’s abuses because of her sexuality. Season three offered glimpses into her horrifying relationship with her father, who physically straddles her in the throes of conflict and maintains an erection while they argue.
After Charles’s death, Yasmin’s relationship with Eric, who is flailing through a post-divorce midlife crisis, becomes a proxy for her daddy issues. (Over lunch, Eric tells her: “Desire is practical, pragmatic—it takes what it can get,” to which Yasmin tosses back a pleading, seething, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?”) Henry also carries shades of Charles, both of them marked by capriciousness and neediness—not to mention sexual deviance. (When Yasmin learns of his urine fetish, she indulges it.) Yet in her scenes with Harington, Abela more often adopts the devious glint and domineering tone that Yasmin used with a pining Robert in season one. After all, Yasmin’s relationship with Henry is one long business deal: When, in the season-three finale, he asks her where she’s been, she replies matter-of-factly, “I got lost in the grounds. And I fucked Robert.”
And on that sex with Robert: Abela threw inhibition out the window for her scene with Lawtey, performing sex so urgent and cathartic it bled into desperation. Of course, this, too, was a strategic move—it was Yasmin’s way of saying goodbye—but with hair matted to her sweaty face and a forehead vein throbbing, it all felt utterly real.
Yasmin may be the victim of her father’s misdeeds, but Abela refuses to make a martyr of her, reminding us time and again that Yasmin has hardly been humbled by her circumstances. (In one episode, she even dresses up as Princess Diana.) She remains as calculating as ever; the sight of Robert playing a lottery scratch-off while she blackmails Hanani Publishing sends her straight into Henry’s arms.
While Abela deserves praise for the no-holds-barred screaming matches and slap-fests of season three, nothing cemented her masterful performance quite like the dead-eyed look of disgust that flashes across her face when Yasmin is compared to her father. “I sound nothing like him,” she says. “He was weak.”
