NEW YORK, NY.- On a humider-than-humid afternoon in July, Myha’la stepped into a teahouse in her Brooklyn neighborhood and joined the line leading to the front counter.
She was wearing a khaki skirt and a matching cropped jacket that revealed the panther tattoos on either side of her abdomen. Her nails were red — she had politely rejected her stylist’s suggestion to paint them brown — and her pixie cut was slick with gel.
The menu seemed endless, with lists of flavors and foams that slowed down several customers placing their orders. Myha’la, a star of HBO’s Generation Z financial drama “Industry,” knew what she wanted: An oolong latte with almond milk, boba and grass jelly.
The woman she plays on the show, Harper Stern, is similarly decisive. As her fellow bright, young overachievers crumble beneath the fluorescent lights of a British investment bank, Harper sees each wobble by a colleague as an opportunity to place an even riskier bet on herself.
“She’s got the sort of killer, quiet confidence that’s actually very dangerous,” Myha’la, 28, said, having installed herself at a counter facing State Street.
When she landed the role on “Industry,” which returns for its third season Sunday, it was her biggest acting job since she graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2018. She didn’t have to look too hard to find common ground with the character, an ambitious young Black woman in an elite, cutthroat environment.
“No way is she going to let anyone know that she’s this insecure or feels this underqualified,” Myha’la said. “She has to show up like, ‘Nobody mess with me, I’m the one.’”
“Industry” overcame a muted initial reception to become something of a sleeper hit. This season, HBO has given it the Sunday night slot previously occupied by “The Sopranos,” “Game of Thrones,” “Succession” and “House of the Dragon.” It probably helped that production of the series, which is shot in Wales on British contracts, was not interrupted by the Hollywood strikes.
Now both the show and its star are eager to break out of “intriguing newcomer” status. Myha’la drew blood in “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” the 2022 Gen Z slasher released by A24, then held her own with Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali in “Leave the World Behind,” Netflix’s 2023 adaptation of the apocalypse novel by Rumaan Alam.
The films represent paths that Myha’la might take from here: edgy indie darling or prestige drama star. She said she prioritized a well-written script, adding, “But I also don’t mind if it ends up being huge.”
She had just returned to New York from Los Angeles, where she had wrapped “Swiped,” a movie starring Lily James as a dating app mogul based on former Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd. Myha’la confessed that she had not spent much time on the apps herself.
“I don’t like meeting strangers,” she said. “I don’t like bars. I don’t like small talk. I have five friends, and that’s enough.”
On her left hand was a chunky silver ring she had received a few weeks earlier from her fiance, actor Armando Rivera. The two met in 2020, when Rivera was assigned to interview a celebrity for a class at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. (Stephen Colbert, his first choice, was not available.)
Rivera, 25, proposed in their shared apartment in Brooklyn in early July, wearing an Etsy T-shirt plastered with Myha’la’s face. “I’m her No. 1 fan,” he said.
Myha’la was born Myha’la Jael Herrold-Morgan. She started going by Myha’la last year, a change reflected in the “Industry” credits for Season 3.
She was raised in San Jose, California. Early on, she had a penchant for breaking the dress code of the Catholic school she attended. Her mother, a hairdresser, had an eclectic closet that stoked Myha’la’s interest in fashion. “She’s always been like, ‘I found these Prada loafers from Goodwill,’” she said.
Myha’la grew obsessed with musical theater thanks to a video she watched as a child of the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” with Bernadette Peters in a leading role. As part of her application materials for Carnegie Mellon’s musical theater program, she sang “I’m a Star” by Scott Alan. Before graduation, she landed a spot on the national tour of “The Book of Mormon.”
Her plan to pursue a career on the musical stage was put on hold in 2019, when she read the scripts for the first four episodes of “Industry.” “I just was like, I’ve never read anything like this,” Myha’la said. “I’ve never imagined a young, 20s, Black American woman at the center of a finance drama. She goes left every time you think she should go right. She holds contradictions, she’s complex, she’s not idyllic in any way.”
Harper is an underdog without a college degree, cutting her teeth at a British bank crawling with entitled Oxford and Cambridge guys. Myha’la plays the part with a compressed intensity, telegraphing anxiety, triumph and frustration through the twitch of an eyelid or a barely perceptible nod.
“We struck gold when we found her,” said Mickey Down, the show’s co-creator and writer, along with Konrad Kay. “In the first season, she brought a composure to the performance that was quite astounding to see from someone who is relatively inexperienced.”
If the show subjects its characters to the stress test of an intense trading floor, it has done something similar for its young stars, most of whom were not widely known before being cast on the show. Marisa Abela, Myha’la’s “Industry” castmate who went on to play Amy Winehouse in the biopic “Back to Black,” said the two had become close through the “intimate” experience of breaking out in the same show, on the same timeline.
“She doesn’t have much self-doubt, which I think is rare, especially for actors,” Abela said. “Myha’la has a lot of strength in her convictions.”
Myha’la is still adjusting to the expectations — and the scrutiny — that come with her raised profile. She has been vocal on social media about the Israel-Hamas war, posting calls for a cease-fire and resharing posts from Bisan Owda, a Palestinian journalist, about the two Al Jazeera journalists killed in an Israeli airstrike last month.
“When I first started to be outspoken, my manager called me and said: ‘Hey, I just want to let you know that I’ve had a couple calls from producers, CEOs, whoever’s in the industry that are calling me and asking, ‘Is she antisemitic?’” Myha’la said.
She added that she was frustrated by what she said felt like pressure from industry higher-ups not to comment on the war. She said that she did not plan to change her approach and that she operated from a place of love.
“I don’t want to be led by fear, you know?” Myha’la said. “I can’t not — it makes me emotional talking about it or thinking about it — I can’t not do what feels right to me.”
On Monday night, the season premiere of “Industry” took place at the Metrograph, a theater on the Lower East Side. Myha’la and Abela walked the red carpet side by side and posed with castmates against an HBO-branded backdrop for a squadron of photographers. Myha’la wore a silver Miu Miu minidress with reflective shards that made her look like a disco ball.
After the showing of the season’s first episode, the crowd made its way to a party at Nine Orchard, a hotel on Canal Street with a rooftop bar where they downed green Jell-O shots and scooped caviar from a Gaetano Pesce vase. Myha’la appeared in a floor-length black gown.
Had she changed her outfit before or after the premiere?
“I didn’t watch it,” she said.
She had gone to get sushi instead.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
