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Amid the swirling vortex of delightfully bad behavior that is every episode of HBO’s Industry, there has been a spot of sunshine in Season 3. Sweetpea Golightly, one of the new trainees at Pierpont Co., is the youngest, freshest presence on the sales and trading floor. The character, played by British actor Miriam Petche, arrives with all of the standard grad enthusiasm—and notably little of the trepidation.
In the first episode, Sweetpea is the first at the office—not out of early-bird eagerness, but because she’s just hit 50,000 followers on TikTok and feels compelled to feed them content before the markets open. “It’s like a full-time job,” she complains to her co-worker Yasmin (Marisa Abela), just a few years removed from the grad program herself, but infinitely more disillusioned. “You’re at your full-time job,” Yas witheringly responds.
But for whatever naivete the interaction implies, Sweetpea is no ingénue. For much of the season so far, she has hovered on the periphery, the pretty girl who knows when to fade into the background, a figure who understands the currency of gossip and that information is power. As the season progresses, however, it is Sweetpea who first diagnoses a dark prognosis for Pierpoint. The extent to which the entire company is teetering on insolvency seems so unlikely that her warnings are brushed aside—but while the rest of her colleagues fret about an IPO gone very sour, or other internecine politics (deck chairs on the Titanic, it turns out), she is proved right.
A few days after last weekend’s pivotal episode “Company Man” aired, I spoke with Petche about her breakthrough role. First things first: It’s pronounced “pet-chi,” she graciously clarifies. “I mean, it’s like a running joke in my family,” she tells me. “What could it possibly go into now? I’ve had ‘pesh.’ I’ve had ‘peach.’”
Petche is speaking to me from Glasgow, where she is visiting her doctor sister, though she grew up and still lives in Brighton, on the UK coast. “There’s something about being by the sea, which I’ve always craved whenever I’ve been away from it,” she says.
Petche spent most of her childhood in that city, going to the shore on sunny days like the rest of the holidaying crowds. Her dad worked in London as an editor and her mother in education, though film was a big part of their lives. She describes a large Jaws poster that greets visitors to their home, and how as a musical kid, she would beg her parents to take her to Billy Elliot or Matilda. When she was about 10, she began working as an actor; her first professional experience was on a show called Vexed. “But when you’re younger, it’s just like, how fun to miss a day of school to go and pretend to be a zombie or a witch,” she says. As she got older, she realized how much the whole endeavor meant to her, and at 18, she left home to attend Guildhall School of Music Drama in London.
In her third year, she was cast in Industry, a show with an indulgently raw vision of the one percent and the young people scrabbling for a foothold within it. She knew the job was going to require a whole new course of study in financial jargon—and that she would have to bone up in order to convince the audience of her authority as the bank’s sidelined sage. “I think I didn’t quite understand the severity of the plot until I received the script. There’s quite a long section of her speaking by herself. There’s this lovely moment where she s just like, Someone needs to sit down and listen,” Petche says.
In fact, the whole experience of filming Industry was educational, even for someone who had been working as an actor for almost a decade. She watched her co-stars to absorb “how do you hold yourself on a set, and how do you hold yourself in interviews, and how do you show grace to other actors and to creatives, and how to stand out for yourself?” she says. “That’s something that I will definitely be taking forward.”
As we watch the current season of Industry careen to a close, Petche is busy auditioning for the next thing. She tells me she’s a huge fan of horror, and when I ask if she’s ever been in a horror film, she laughs. “No, but oh my God, is that my dream!”
I tell her I’ll make sure to include that for any casting directors reading this.
“I appreciate that so much,” she replies. “I mean, I just want to be covered in blood.”
In the meantime, she’s been doing a lot of cooking—she describes an elaborate grilled peach dish involving soy sauce-toasted hazelnuts—and reading: quite a bit of Arthur Miller at the moment, and she’s just finished The Secret History. All in all, an entirely wholesome set of pastimes that would likely be anathema to her fictional peers on Industry, but bode well as an indication of where this talented young actress is going.
