‘Industry’ Star Marisa Abela Needed a Break. So She Took a Role Opposite Cate Blanchett

You’d think that booking a role alongside Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender — in a Steven Soderbergh spy thriller, no less — might be a tad intimidating for most 28-year-old actresses. For Marisa Abela, though, it felt like blessed relief.

“The premise of my career so far has been, ‘Here is this girl you don’t know, and she is going to carry this project,’ ” says Abela, who played Amy Winehouse in the much scrutinized 2024 biopic Back to Black and has lately been front and center on HBO’s high-octane finance drama Industry. “So, to finally be in a situation where the pressure isn’t on my shoulders, where my job is to play off the talents of my heroes, it felt almost like rest.”

Abela booked the role in Black Bag — she plays an junior intelligence agent whose boss is investigating his wife — exactly one year ago, and it was the first time she didn’t have to audition. Soderbergh had seen her as Yasmin, Industry‘s hard-partying publishing heiress — she’s all over the show’s third-season plotlines — and needed only a Zoom meeting to confirm that she had what it takes.

At the time Soderbergh called, Abela was anxiously anticipating the pending release of Back to Black — the sort of super high-profile part that can make or break a young career — and buy-in from a director of his standing was exactly the validation she needed.

“Amy Winehouse was a really scary role to take,” she says. “It was such a big film for me, and I wanted so much for it to land well and to come out of it OK. It’s such a sensitive subject, and the emotional care and precision that you have to employ every day [during the press tour] takes a huge amount of stamina.”

Despite her growing film résumé, Industry remains the center of her professional orbit. Abela, who grew up in Brighton, England, before attending London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, was plucked out of drama school and cast in the show alongside a gaggle of then-unknown actors to play new hires at the fictional investment bank Pierpoint & Co. She met her Industry co-stars for the first time on the train ride to Cardiff, Wales, where the series is shot. “I was treating it almost like an acting exercise, which was great because it kept me from being crippled by self-consciousness,” she says.

The show premiered during the height of the COVID pandemic to critical acclaim and found a dedicated, niche audience. HBO offered a quick renewal and Abela, who grew up watching her mother, actress Caroline Gruber, work extra jobs to supplement her onscreen work (she was best known for such 1990s films as Heil Honey, I’m Home!), realized that she had a full-time acting career, too. Indeed, on the day she zoomed with THR from her London apartment, she was getting ready to shoot an ad campaign in South Korea and prepping for the media tour for Black Bag, in theaters March 14, during which she will undoubtably find herself repeatedly answering such questions as, “What was it like working with Blanchett and Fassbender?”

“My favorite way to meet is at a table read, because I like to get my work out there first,” she says, practicing an answer. “What do you even say at dinner with these amazing people that you’ve idolized for so long? I think it wasn’t until I was on set with Cate and Michael that I felt truly comfortable. After doing a scene that I thought was pretty good, I was like, ‘OK, now they know that I’m an actor, too.’ “

She has a pretty good response in case anybody asks about working with Soderbergh as well: “Steven works in such a singular way — he’s the camera operator and the director and the editor,” she says. “It feels like its own experience to work with someone with that much of a vision. It taught me to trust. You’re kind of just playing catch with him, following what he wants to see in the scene and learning to deliver it instantly.”

As for that other inevitable question — what she plans on doing next — she’s still work-shopping an answer. “I’ve played so many tough women,” she says, “I’d be excited to try something that feels slightly softer. Those are the roles I’m looking at right now.”

This story appeared in the March 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.