Kiernan Shipka on Industry, the Mad Men Resurgence & Learning Finance Jargon

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Industry Season Four

Industry’s new season opens at a pulsing London nightclub, where we first meet Kiernan Shipka’s Hayley Clay: a young, working woman blowing off steam by dancing and taking drugs with a mysterious stranger (Charlie Heaton). It’s typical fare for the critically acclaimed HBO drama, known for putting its pleasure-seeking characters in boundary-pushing, dangerous situations. The next scene is even more Industry: the following morning at Hayley’s flat, Heaton’s character reveals he’s actually an investigative journalist prying into her boss, a CEO of the fintech company Tender, whose last assistant mysteriously disappeared. Hayley threatens him with a knife and a racially tinged verbal tirade, and we’re off to the races.

Filming that scene was “so fun,” Shipka tells W over the phone brightly. She’s in a car on her way to a Park City hotel, having landed in Utah for the Sundance premiere of her new indie movie, Shitheads. The actor is a consummate professional who grew up on the screen playing Sally Draper on Mad Men from ages six to 16. (She then found a whole new, younger audience with Netflix’s supernatural series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, where she starred in the titular role for two seasons, from 2018 to 2020). Now, at 26, she’s in another period of reinvention with a string of grittier projects, like Osgood Perkins’s 2024 horror film Longlegs, Gia Coppola’s Pamela Anderson comeback-vehicle The Last Showgirl (2025), and this year, a leading role on prestige TV’s most amoral show.

This season of Industry moves from the original setting of the fictional investment firm Pierpoint & Co. to focus on the ill-fated marriage of Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), and their work with Tender, a shady company that processes payments for an OnlyFans analog called Sirens. As Hayley, Shipka plays a Calabasas-born executive assistant hustling her way up the corporate ladder. Harper Stern (Myha’la) and her father-figure-slash-boss Ken Leung (Eric Tao) are still in the mix, their business increasingly intertwining with Henry’s and Yasmin’s. Like always, creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have spun a world that pulls from real-life business and politics headlines—making the characters’ actions even more high-stakes.

In the season’s third episode, Shipka’s Hayley, now working as an assistant to the cutthroat Yasmin, acts on the pair’s brewing sexual tension and engages in something of a threesome with her and Henry. The moment takes Hayley from a typical striver to a place that feels much darker—in other words, classic Industry.

Below, Shipka talks joining the cast, that threesome scene, and what it’s like to have people constantly rediscover her on Mad Men:

Season four opens with the club scene, which quickly turns dark. What was it like being introduced to the audience that way?

It’s a version of her we don’t get to see again until later—it’s a very raw Hayley. Then we’re reacquainted with her as she puts on all these masks and starts playing her own game of chess. To be the party girl, who is aggressive with reckless abandon, set the tone for who she really was. And doing it with Charlie was so fun, because we were both new [on Industry]. We bonded over that.

Hayley is pretty low-key until episode three, when she gets pulled into a quasi-threesome with her employers. What was it like filming that scene with Marisa Abela and Kit Harington?

There aren’t many scenes that I read where I go, “Oh, the Internet’s going to react to that,” but obviously, this is one where you do have the thought. I just put it away in a drawer and saved it for another place and time, which I guess is now. But on the day, I wasn’t thinking about that. It was about the scene on a more psychological level.

That scene’s so important to the plot because it means a lot for each character. Going into it, that was the main conversation. Having an intimacy coordinator, the choreography worked out, and it felt comfortable and planned ahead in a way that allowed us to show up and explore what our characters were going through.

Your recent roles have had a bit of an edge. How are you approaching choosing parts these days? What are you drawn to?

Part of it’s just getting older—being in my 20s and gravitating toward more mature pieces of work. But what I love most is working with people I admire, who I think are incredible artists in their own right. I took two of my best friends to the Industry premiere, and my heart was racing out of my chest before it started.

Industry is famously a bleak show, but it seems like you’re all having fun on set.

The vibes are great. I’m always surprised when I step onto these things that are dark and intense, and the sets are boisterous and full of awesome hangs and great people. When a scene is more deep, and the energy calls for that, it’s that. But everyone is able to turn on this light switch and become their characters in such an astonishing fashion—then walk away and talk about what we’re doing over the weekend.

There’s a fan meme about watching Industry and having no idea what’s going on with all the finance jargon. Do you understand what the characters are saying in those scenes?

I’m with the memers, through and through. As someone who’s been in the arts since I was a baby, financial speak isn’t my specialty. I was reading those scripts, rereading them, and going, “I’m getting an education here, too.”

It seems like every few years, a new generation finds out about Mad Men, and there’s a resurgence of discourse around the show. It’s happening right now. What’s it like to have people discovering both your six-year-old self on Mad Men and your current, adult self on Industry?

It does a funny thing to my relationship with time, to know that someone out there is watching Mad Men and experiencing an eight-year-old me running around in a kitchen, and then the commercial break is me on Industry doing something completely different. It’s trippy, but it’s very cool. I love this work. I love it even more than I ever have.