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Marisa Abela finds it very difficult to go to the gym. Not for the usual reasons – lack of time or motivation – but because she says the reception she gets there is “insane”. The actor lives near the City of London, and her local gym is nestled between the gigantic, glinting glass offices of the capital’s financial district – which also happens to be the natural habitat of Yasmin Kara-Hanani, the hyper-privileged and extravagantly troubled junior banker Abela plays in the hit BBC drama Industry. And it’s not just while she’s exercising – that swarm of real‑life bankers desperate to tell Abela how much they love the show means meals out can be an issue, too. “If I tried to go to a salad bar at lunchtime in the City …” she trails off, looking slightly dazed.
Abela isn’t just highly recognisable for her part in Industry, a satire of the reckless, hedonistic, egomaniac-littered world of finance that since its 2020 debut has blossomed from niche concern to TV’s spiciest workplace drama. The 28-year-old also gets stopped in the street for being “the girl who played Amy Winehouse”. (Recently, people have finally started to ask her if she is Marisa. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, I am!’” she says, with mock grandeur.) Last year, she starred in Back to Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of the late singer, an oddly paced film rescued by Abela’s performance, which combines Winehouse’s trademark wit and stubborn iconoclasm with an endearing vulnerability. In her hands, Amy was, above all, a doting daughter and an adorably guileless romantic.
As an actor, sweetness is Abela’s USP: Industry’s Yasmin could have easily ended up being a man-eating mean girl had Abela not softened her into a wide-eyed, insecurity-riddled underdog. And, today, as soon as the actor pops her head in to ask permission to eat her supermarket salad during our interview, it becomes clear that sweetness is her defining quality off screen, too. It’s Valentine’s Day – or, more importantly, T-minus two days to the Baftas, where she has been nominated for the rising star award – and Abela is (politely) squeezing eating opportunities into a packed schedule of photoshoots and dress fittings. Dinner, however, is safeguarded: she’s going for a romantic meal with Jamie Bogyo, her actor-writer boyfriend – sorry, fiance. “I hate that word, but he gets annoyed when I call him my boyfriend,” she laughs.
In the event, Abela didn’t take home the Bafta – it went to her erstwhile Industry co-star David Jonsson. But it doesn’t matter; the actor doesn’t need a statuette to prove she’s a star in the making. Among her fans is Steven Soderbergh, who cast her in his new London-set spy thriller Black Bag based solely on her performance in Industry. Abela had prepared for what she thought was an audition for the part of smart-but-naive spook Clarissa. “But as soon as I logged on to Zoom, Steven said: ‘The part is yours if you want it.’ I was like, whoa!” says Abela, sitting on an office chair in a small London photography studio, de-glammed yet still elegant in a long brown dress, chunky black boots and black cardigan.
Being handpicked by Soderbergh was even more flattering considering the calibre of the rest of the cast: Black Bag also stars Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender and Pierce Brosnan. Before shooting began, all the actors went for dinner in London. “I was looking around the table, like, this is fucking insane.” How on earth do you make general chitchat with that lot? “No, literally,” she nods, eyes wide. “Some people were talking about AI at one point and I was just …” her face telegraphs panicked bafflement.
If they were Industry fans, her dining companions were probably just as excited about meeting her. When the show began, Yasmin was one of many cogs in the narrative machine, but she became the show’s emotional core, following a sensational third series focusing on her relationship with her vile father. The character is arguably among the most fascinating women to have graced our TV screens: both calculating and credulous, as well as haughty and, in Abela’s words, “anxious to please”. In real life, Abela has observed a type of London rich kid “for whom the red carpet just rolls out in front of them and they don’t need to worry about anything. Yasmin’s never really had that energy. She’s incredibly privileged, obviously, but, because I’m playing her, she has a little bit more uneasiness.”
Abela is referring to her own childhood. She grew up in Rottingdean, a village near Brighton, with parents who were both performers – but it wasn’t exactly a nepo baby situation. Her mother, Caroline Gruber, was an actor, appearing in TV shows such as Grange Hill and The Bill throughout the 1980s and 90s, but scaled back her career to look after Abela and her elder brother, Jack, and eventually ended up working in a call centre rather than taking on acting roles that would mean leaving her children for long periods. (She’s currently “crushing it”, Abela says, in a later-life return to the job.)
Abela’s parents split up when she was four; her dad, Angelo, had been in a comedy double act called the Vicious Boys, who appeared frequently on late-1980s kids’ telly. Abela has watched everything of his that’s available on YouTube – including “an advert for Twirl where he’s got a big mullet” – but “he’s either thrown away, burned or hiding any more footage than that”. By the time she was born, her dad had turned to directing (his credits include Hollyoaks and My Parents Are Aliens).
It was Abela’s education that placed her cheek by jowl with some of the wealthiest children in the country. She won a drama scholarship to the “very exclusive” Roedean school in East Sussex, where she was humiliated for her lack of wealth (her peers mocked the small bungalow she lived in, for example). One birthday, a schoolfriend picked her up “in a blacked-out Bentley and her chauffeur drove us to Harrods. Her dad met us there and said, ‘Pick out anything you want for your birthday.’”
It was close to Christmas and the pets section had “a stocking for dogs, and I was like: ‘Oh, I’m gonna get this for my dog.’ I was so overwhelmed and confused – I was 11 years old.” Her re-enactment of a young girl panickedly purchasing a dog’s stocking instead of some designer clothes makes me laugh out loud – which, I quickly realise, was not quite the intended response; Abela’s eyes remain saucer-like as she continues to recount her naivety. “I didn’t know what these brands were, or what things cost. I just remember going home at night and bawling my eyes out, being like, I don’t get it.”
There was one upside. Witnessing how the other half lived gave her the ability to “code-switch”, she says. It was a skill honed when swapping between her mum’s and dad’s homes and the cultures of their extended families (her mother is from a Jewish background – something that gave her an affinity with Winehouse; the opening scenes in Back to Black “felt like a Friday night I’d been at before in north-west London” – while her dad is of Maltese and Libyan heritage).
At 13, Abela played Dolly Levi in a school production of The Matchmaker. As she came off stage, her mum said: “You’re an actor.” She didn’t totally buy it – “I remember being like, well, she would say that” – but her teachers agreed. Did her dad encourage her, too? She pauses to think. “I mean, encouraging is maybe the wrong word. I think he was more … My dad was incredibly proud whenever he saw me on stage – he’s a very emotional man. My mum will be like, ‘You can do this.’ My dad will just be a weeping mess.”
Even with glowing endorsements from her mum and her teachers, Abela felt she needed a “seal of approval from a school like Rada” in order to pursue acting professionally. She didn’t get in the first time – instead she spent her gap year on a sustainability programme in Fiji (“cleaning coral and scuba diving; it was kind of amazing”). She planned to take up the place she had been offered to study history at University College London if she was rejected a second time – but there was no need. She was still at Rada when she landed the part of Yasmin.
Soon, however, that impeccably launched career came to an abrupt halt. Filming wrapped on series one of Industry in December 2019; by spring the country was in lockdown and Abela feared her career momentum was draining away. “And then I really wasn’t feeling well. I thought I had Covid, and then I thought I had long Covid because I was not able to get out of bed and I didn’t know what was going on. I remember calling 111 and they were like, ‘What’s your address?’ And I burst into tears, because I didn’t know. It was like I had brain fog; I couldn’t think straight.” Abela saw a doctor, who found a large lump in her neck and thought it was a swollen lymph node. But she was so “freaked out” that she paid for a private ultrasound, “and the guy was like, ‘Oof.’” She got the results of the biopsy at her mum’s house in Brighton. “They said, ‘It’s thyroid cancer.’ It was just shock.”
Aged 23, she was categorised as a young adult under the NHS, meaning her treatment was “sped up. And I had my own teenage cancer nurse with me through everything. That was great because no one else could come to the hospital with me because it was Covid.” She had an eight-hour operation to remove the tumour, and later radiotherapy. “Now I go in every three months for my blood tests and my checkups.”
The diagnosis was terrifying, Abela says, but the continuing psychological toll has been “scarier”. When she got the diagnosis, she “slipped into game mode. I was like, ‘OK, what do we do? Let’s fix this as soon as possible.’” Ever since then she gets anxious about every twinge. “As women, our body works in this very efficient cycle and we’re told that pain is normal, but, after having something like that, the normal things that people get month to month freak me out.”
At the same time, the cliche about surviving a serious illness is also true. “I do have clarity on the most important things in a way that I didn’t as a 23-year-old, and now health is always at the forefront of my mind.” Actually, she corrects herself, the shadow does sometimes lift and she forgets. “And then it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got my appointment in a few days’, and you get nervous.”
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One thing Abela’s illness didn’t change was her work ethic. She clearly prides herself on the “stamina” that allowed her to go straight from Back to Black to Industry – “a six-month job on to another six-month job – I was in every single scene of Back to Black, so I was shooting every day, and I was fine!” By her standards, at least. “Maybe if you spoke to Jamie or my mum, they’d have been, ‘No, she was really tired and needed a break.’ But had I booked the perfect next job that started shooting two days after Industry wrapped, I’d have done it – without a doubt.”
It’s a feat that is even more impressive considering the demands of playing Winehouse. There was the physical metamorphosis: the weight she lost to emulate the dishevelled waif-like look of the musician’s later years. Abela felt conflicted when people in the industry complimented her on her unnaturally skinny frame and is still unsure how much the experience affected her own body image. “I don’t know how well I did or didn’t do at being sucked into that whole weight-loss thing. There were some days where I found it difficult and there were some days where I was empowered by it.”
Then there was the psychological strain of being involved in such a controversial project. Some felt a biopic was too soon and too exploitative; some fan communities were in uproar about Abela’s lack of physical resemblance to Winehouse. Did she find it easy to avoid the commentary? “No! But I think I’m quite good at understanding where things are coming from. I don’t necessarily internalise things that I don’t think are about me. I know that there was a connection I had to Amy that was authentic – maybe not in every way or in the specific way that some fans felt that they needed to see, but I know I connected to something.” She did, however, feel “very exposed for the first time in my life and that did shift something in me in terms of a self-preservation vibe”, she says, matter-of-factly. “I know there are so many jobs that are hard work, but this industry can be really, really crushing emotionally and it’s incredibly exposing. It’s not necessarily a natural existence.”
Industry required a more literal kind of exposure: from the start, Yasmin’s dynamic – with practically everyone – was highly sexualised. By the end of series three, we uncover a disturbing root cause. Abela didn’t know this explicitly before she read that episode’s script, but she and the show’s writers, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, had been laying the groundwork for years. “I remember when we were speaking in those first rehearsals I said, ‘Yasmin is one of those women that absolutely sees herself through the male gaze and I think that comes from her relationship with her father.’” By series two it was obvious that “he had an inappropriate relationship to her body”.
Building this psychological portrait entailed many sex scenes and a fair amount of nudity – something Abela isn’t over-keen to repeat. “I never want it to come across like I was made to do anything I didn’t want to do”; in fact, she says, she was “kind of excited in season one. It was part of the vibe of the show, it was liberating.” But then the papers started covering it. “It was weird for me to be 22 and on a front page that said: ‘We didn’t recognise you with your clothes on’, or whatever. I think I thought it was funny at the time – I was just so shocked. But now I don’t find it so funny.”
During the early days of filming, she believed she was so young and inexperienced that “no one would really care” about her nudity preferences. In the past, says Abela, she has conflated doing her job well with being “easy” to work with – but being objectified in a way she hadn’t foreseen prompted her to put her foot down.
Series four of Industry is filming imminently, and Yasmin may be slightly more buttoned-up this time anyway. The end of series three saw her make a strategic – and life-changing – decision in her romantic life, one that has Abela excited “to play a slightly different side” of Yasmin. “For the last two seasons she’s had nothing to lose, she’s already at rock bottom – but now she’s not at rock bottom. I want to see her be more composed.”
In a meta twist, the final scene of the last series features a cameo from Bogyo. Was it a one-off? “I hope not, I hope it leads on to some huge affair,” she grins. “No, I actually don’t know.” Between her family and her fiance, whom she met at Rada, she seems to be surrounded by actors. Does she live in a thespian bubble? “I have a whole world that is not acting-related, because Jamie went to Yale first. So a lot of his friends are lawyers and bankers and artists and gallerists. And I love hanging out with them because they couldn’t give less of a shit about what I do. We just talk about random things and it’s fun.”
Abela, on the other hand, cares very deeply about what she does – and the impression she leaves on her colleagues. Despite her success, she remains hyper-focused on proving herself – on Black Bag she worried her starry castmates might be thinking, “Oh look, she’s won a raffle ticket and gets to be on set with us” – and stresses that her “number one goal every single day on set is for people to think I’m doing a good job as an actor”, something that reminds me of Yasmin’s absolute dedication to even the lowliest of tasks on Industry.
Yet Abela is beginning to realise that her conscientiousness may have made her slightly passive in her career. “I’ve been really used to seeing what role comes my way and doing the best I can do with it,” she says. Her new goal is to be more proactive – “like writing an email to a director and saying, ‘I would love to work with you one day.’”
She is still a Briton, though. “I think it’s very hard for British people – I find it very difficult – to put yourself up on a silver platter because it feels gauche or like you’re going to get rejected.” She’s “getting better at advocating for myself”; her people-pleasing days are numbered. She steels herself. “At a certain point, the regret of not doing a thing is worse than the fear of rejection.”
