Note: This story contains spoilers from “Industry” Season 4, Episode 8.
In the “Industry” Season 4 finale, it’s the end of the road for Tender after Harper (Myha’la) and SternTao exposed the payment processor for the scam that it was, but Yasmin (Marisa Abela) wasn’t part of that sinking ship.
While Whitney (Max Minghella) runs from law enforcement and attempts to bring Henry (Kit Harington) with him, Yasmin distances herself from the disaster as she breaks things off with Henry, and later even cooperates with the police to turn him in, ensuring she gets out of the mess scot-free. It’s a necessary means of survival and self-preservation for Yasmin, with Abela noting she no longer has any “red lines” she isn’t willing to cross.
“When Yasmin goes into self-preservation mode, nothing else matters — once she’s decided ‘I’m unsafe,’ all morals and ethics go out the window,” Abela told TheWrap. “She does not want to go back to where she was at the beginning of Season 3 — that sort of fight or flight Yasmin, where she’s completely at the mercy of the whims of whatever is going to happen to her. She will never be in that position again.”
Yas manages to keep herself out of the Tender mess, and six weeks later, she’s in the midst of her divorce and landed back among the elites, this time assisting Henry’s uncle, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill) with political strategy for right-wing politician Sebastian (Edward Holcroft).
The scope of her work, however, takes a turn when, during a gathering for Sebastian in Paris, it comes to light that she’s been paying young women to tend to the high-powered men in the room, arguing to Harper that she’s giving them access to the world of elites more than anything else.
“I think she sees herself as a very, very high-class madam … rather than a sex trafficker or someone that is abusing these young girls,” Abela said. “Her whole life, Yasmin has felt misunderstood and controlled and judged because of her gender and her sexuality and the way that men see her. I think this is her saying, ‘If I can control that, not just with myself, but with these other girls,’ then I can make myself completely useful.”
By bringing her thoughts up to Harper, whom Abela notes is the “most important person” in her life after losing Henry, Yasmin’s confession is either “the first sign of either a cry for help or the destruction of the relationship,” per Abela. “Surely she knows that this is not something that Harper should be bearing witness to, so I guess I like to think that it’s a cry for help, rather than her being so desensitized to the thing that she doesn’t think that Harper is going to pick up on what’s going on,” she said.
Abela sees the rift that follows with Harper when Yasmin refuses to go with her as the second breakup her character goes through in the finale, following her split from Henry, which Abela jokes “we could all have seen coming since the end of Episode 2.”
“This one, when Harper leaves the room … that’s the really tragic end,” she said.
Below, Abela unpacks that whirlwind finale, those comparisons to Ghislaine Maxwell and her hopes for redemption next season. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: When would you say Yas understood Tender was a sinking ship?
Abela: Maybe the end of Episode 3 or the beginning of Episode 4. She starts to suspect Whitney as someone that she can’t fully trust in Episode 4 — she’s starting to think … “I might need to look on this ship for where the life jackets are,” because this doesn’t feel right to me. As soon as she sees Harper at the conference and … she hears a question that Dyker is asking at the conference, she starts to feel that like something’s wrong. Yasmin really trusts Harper’s instincts as a woman in finance, and as much as she wants to say that it’s just Harper being obsessed with her and her life, I think she knows that Harper wouldn’t risk her own capital and the capital of her shareholders if she didn’t think that there was something going wrong here.
The finale kicks off with Yas breaking things off with Henry. Do you think she ever loved him and the breakup was genuine or in her self-interest?
All breakups are out of self-interest, in a good way. This is something that she needed to to do for herself. At the end of the day, Henry has not been a good husband to Yasmin — That’s undeniable that their relationship hasn’t worked, and leaving aside all of the parts that Yasmin has to play in it and everything that’s happening with Yasmin in her own world, this marriage isn’t working, and she needs to get out, so I think that actually, that is quite an honest scene. I think that best-case scenario, that marriage would have worked, and Yasmin could have been a wife to a successful man that respected her, and she could have lived a very cushy life — she didn’t enter into the marriage wanting it to fail. So in that way, she loved him. Is Yasmin fully capable of an all knowing, all-encompassing love that is completely selfless? I’m not sure, but I think we see in Episode 2 that she was giving of herself to him, and she did want the best for him, but it’s in her nature to protect herself when she starts to feel like s–t’s hitting the fan.
By the time we see Yas again she’s clearly figured out a way to keep busy and stay in the elite circles. How do you imagine she manufactured this new role for herself?
She is a survivor. She’s like a cockroach, she’s going to make it through. I liken Yasmin this season, especially, at the end of the season, to one of those little fish that swims under the fin of a shark. If I’m right next to this thing, it’s not going to eat me. The proximity to power is incredibly seductive to Yasmin, I think, a) because she likes to be successful and she likes all of the trappings that come with power make her feel good — It’s not just a survival instinct, it’s also [that] she is greedy, but more than anything … she says that I feel necessary here. Yasmin has spent her whole life feeling unwanted, unloved, misunderstood, and in this moment, for better or for worse, she feels most like she is a cog in a machine that like would not turn without her, and that is an important feeling that that feels like safety for her.
She maintains her working relationship and maybe something more with Haley. How do you understand their relationship?
Yasmin sees a lot of herself in Haley, and Haley is kind of the perfect victim for Yasmin, in a sense, because Haley seemingly has a lot of self-possession. Haley is the poster child for the fact that what Yasmin is doing isn’t that wrong — that what she’s doing is giving women that want agency agency, and giving women that want to use the thing that people have always seen them as and used them for anyway for their own gain.
There’s been some comparisons this season of Yasmin to Ghislaine Maxwell. What do you make of that?
Mickey [Down], Konrad [Kay] and I were talking about that from Season 3, the lady Yasmin being in the same boat as the lady Ghislaine and her father dying on the boat in mysterious circumstances when he was fleeing the British government. All of these things have been in the works for a long time. I didn’t think that necessarily it was going to end up here — it’s one of the great things about television that you have all of this time to lay the foundations for a character and bring the audience on a low and slow story. I mean, I don’t think that the Ghislaine Maxwell has been in the like pressure cooker for Yasmin since Season 1, but something happened and we ended up there.
I think that Mickey and Konrad felt like, rather than this just being a classic Lady Macbeth-type storyline, what we unwittingly watched is the origin story of a woman that gets in bed with powerful, abusive men. As a society, we will always be most outraged and sickened by women that abuse their power against younger women sexually — it will always be the thing that is so confusing to us, because it feels like biologically wrong for a woman to behave in that way. think the fact that the audience are mostly on Yasmin’s side, up until the end of Season 3, it just flips things on their head and does something interesting with how people can turn.
Yasmin has the tape of Eric and the young girl. Does this confirm that she set up the situation and blackmailed Eric?
That was set up by Whitney, that situation that wasn’t set up by Yasmin, but I’m sure that’s the kind of thing that she would do now. Yasmin now, it’s just about having control over people. It’s what we see, unfortunately, in our politics and in our lives — “I have something over you, therefore you work for me now.” I think that, again, it’s her desperate cling on to control and to survival.
Whitney and Hayley have been doing this for a long time, which I think is something that it’s another reason that Yasmin feels she can explain away what it is that she’s doing. Other people have already been doing this. This happens. We live in a world full of corruption and seduction and the abuse of power. Don’t call me psycho for being a part of it when I have fallen victim to it for my entire life. I think that’s what Yasmin is doing by showing Harper this video.
The season leaves off with Yasmin listening to her dad’s voicemail on repeat in a disturbing haze. How did you understand that scene and want to play it?
I think it’s about Yasmin hardening herself up against all the things that have traumatized her — it’s Yasmin trying to have control over these things that still disturb her and still inform every decision that she makes. It’s like shock therapy in a way, she’s trying to unlearn the fear that she has around her relationship with her father.
We really didn’t know [how to play it]. Actually, I think we came in and I was like, “I have no idea what this is going to be. Let’s just give it a go,” and that’s kind of what we did. It was so disturbing hearing his voice with everything we know now about where Yasmin has come that … it was very moving. We just let the Voice Note play, and they let the cameras roll, and it just was what it was.
Are you hoping for a redemption arc for her in the future?
Of course I would want that for her … but who knows? We’re talking about “Industry” here, and it’s a pretty brutal show.
I’m very intrigued to see the response to who Yasmin has become at the end of Season 4. I’ve loved playing someone for four seasons that people either love or love to hate, and it’s going to be really interesting to be playing someone who, at the end of Season 4 is kind of unforgivable, so I’m just excited to see how people feel about Yasmin. I’m scared, but I’m excited.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Industry” Seasons 1-4 are now streaming on HBO.
