Myha’la has learned not to take bullshit from anyone

“Were you going to say I play a lot of stone-cold bitches?” We, in fact, were not. We’d been reaching for a word that usefully links the roles played by Myha’la. We’d settled on ‘disruptors’, but before we can get it out she’s offered her own. She plays a lot of women who will enter a situation and blow it up; who take no bullshit from anyone. But her suggestion isn’t totally wrong.

If you know Myha’la, it’s almost certainly for Industry, the BBC/HBO drama about a group of 20-somethings gradually losing their souls to the world of high-stakes banking. She plays Harper, perhaps the show’s most ruthless character, who gets into banking by lying about her qualifications, is discovered and fired, then claws her way back to success. The show, a slow-burn hit, turned Myha’la (she dropped her surname Herrold in 2023, because she thought her unique first name sounded stronger alone) into a ‘cult star’, if there can be such a thing. When it launched in 2020, it didn’t make her a household name, but it got her noticed by the, well, industry. She started racking up parts playing self-possessed women who speak their minds and, surprisingly frequently, meet unhappy ends. In horror Bodies Bodies Bodies she’s one of a group of teens whose brittle friendships implode as they try to figure out which of them is a killer. In Leave The World Behind, she faces the probable apocalypse with Julia Roberts. In Black Mirror episode ‘Loch Henry’, she nudges her boyfriend to make a documentary about a serial killer in his sleepy hometown, unearthing very grim secrets.

“I like a character to have something to fight against, or fight for”

Her latest role sees her neither playing a “stone-cold bitch” nor dying. In Swiped, a fictionalised story of Whitney Wolfe Herd, who co-founded the dating app Tinder, then Bumble, Myha’la is Tisha, Wolfe’s closest colleague. If it initially seems like a classic best friend role, Myha’la says Tisha absolutely fits the disruptor bracket. The film is set in the early 2010s, in the very bro-ey, very white world of tech start-ups. “How many Black women were in tech?” she wonders. “I don’t know… Do we think this woman [Whitney] would have been surrounded by any people of colour?”

“I like [a character] to have something to fight against, or fight for,” she continues. “Justice is really important to me. Sticking up for the little guy… Any character I play, you could probably go through and ask, ‘What do they feel is an injustice? What is the thing they’re fighting against?” We clearly make a face, because she pauses. Before we can finish asking what exactly makes Industry’s Harper or Jordan, her Bodies Bodies Bodies character, justice warriors, she guffaws and stresses, “They’re not all activists… Harper feels wrongdoing is being done unto her. Jordan feels betrayed by someone she loves. That’s injustice!”

Myha’la didn’t set out to play a rogues gallery of twisted justice-seekers. She was, before she’d even taken her first breath, intent on being a song-and-dance girl. “This is obnoxious,” she says, “but the first time I went to the theatre I was still in the womb. My mum went to see a production of On This Island… She said the lights went down and the first number started and I was kicking like crazy the whole time. She was like, ‘damn’. She just knew.” Myha’la was enrolled in theatre classes from the age of six. “She was like, ‘I can’t hold off any longer’. I was such a dramatic child. I was always singing and dancing and stealing attention… I think she knew this was my gig.”

Myha’la does not give off theatre kid vibes. She’s very low-key. She stands barely over five feet, and today is swaddled in a huge black sweater. Curled up on a big sofa, she doesn’t seem like someone who needs the room’s full attention on her, even if the audience here is only NME, her publicist and her fiancé, Armando, who’s sitting politely in a corner. “Oh you put me in a room with a couple of other people and I’ll be singing,” she laughs when we tell her she doesn’t seem theatrical, which she takes as a compliment.

Her dramatic pivot from pursuing Broadway to playing women who you can’t imagine would be caught dead even watching a musical, was sort of an accident. She auditioned for and won the role of Harper not long after graduating, at a time when she had a tiny handful of credits and would have been grateful for any job. That she happened to win such a great, distinctive role, and play it so indelibly, meant she became cemented in people’s minds as Harper, or a Harper type. Roles of similar moral messiness came her way. And she started to like it. “I feel like polarising art is always the best,” she says, “[Characters] that people love to hate, or hate to love, that to me is the definition of humanity, because we all hold so many contradictions.” And she very much enjoys that it lets her play with expectation in her personal life too. “One of my favourite things that people say to me all the time is, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you were going to be nice.’ At first, I was like, ‘Fuck you!’ But, you know, good! That means I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.”

“One of my favourite things that people say to me all the time is, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you were going to be nice’”

Playing people who are supremely confident does not necessarily mean you yourself feel supremely confident. Leading a huge show in her very early twenties, with minimal experience behind her, was not something Myha’la slid into with ease. “Nobody can prepare you for being number one on the callsheet,” she says. “You set the tone every single day… It’s trial by fire… I had to recognise pretty quickly, ‘Oh people are looking at me… If I look people in the eye and shake their hands and know their names and am respectful of their jobs, they take care of me too.”

She learned a lot from Julia Roberts on that front, when she worked with her on Leave The World Behind. “She just affirmed things I believed to be true,” she says. “She is patient and she is respectful of the hierarchy on set. And she doesn’t take no bullshit. She doesn’t take no shit. She’s like, I don’t mess around. I came to work today and it’s disrespectful if you don’t bring your A-game… And I feel that way too, but to watch someone who’s done it for as long as she has, do it with so much grace and precision… it’s inspiring. I want to be like that when I grow up.”

She’s still only 28, but Myha’la is definitely into the ‘grown up’ stage of her career. She’s not just flitting around having a nice time. She’s entered a point in her career where she isn’t always chasing roles but having them offered. “She didn’t audition [for Tish],” says Swiped director Rachel Lee Goldenberg. “[In her screen roles] I found her formidable, just really unflinching… Whatever you throw at her, she has this natural ability to make a character feel lived in.”

And Myha’la’s worked to get to this point, of “being in the lucky position that I can be a little more choosy”. A lot of actors will tell you there’s no strategy in how they pick their roles, that the art is the only consideration. Myha’la is more honest. “As I grow, I feel like I’m being forced to be more business-minded,” she says. She wants her work to be great, of course, but realises a good career is built on opportunity, not just good taste. “I audition for things all the time that I’m not quite sure about, but it’s how you meet people. You don’t know where it will take you.”

One thing Myha’la has yet to do, which must surely come soon, is play a lead role in a movie. “My team would really like me to [do that next]”, she says. Her Broadway ambitions are still very much alive, but her dream movie role would be to play Eartha Kitt, the American actress and singer probably best remembered for playing Catwoman in the 1960s Batman TV show, though that was a fraction of a fascinating life.

“Talk about resilient,” Myha’la says. “Her life was incredible. She endured an unthinkable amount of abuse and trauma.” Kitt was outspoken about the Vietnam War during an audience with the US President, which did enormous damage to her career for years. Kitt described her place in the industry as “not Black enough to be considered Black and not white enough to be considered white.” “She deserves honouring,” says Myha’la. Asked if she can do the famous voice, the theatre kid flies out. “COMPROMISE?!” she growls, mimicking a famous Kitt line. You sense she’d devour it.

That, though, is a dream for later. Her next project will be season four of Industry. The show is now a very big deal. If its first two seasons were an under the radar success, the third saw it explode. In America, it took HBO’s prime Sunday night slot, previously occupied by shows like Game Of Thrones and Succession. It put expectations on the show to become ‘prestige television’, which it definitively met. Reviews were glowing and ratings, while still modest, climbed. It began winning awards. “[Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s] writing in season three just hit a new level of ‘fuck you’,” Myha’la says. “It was a new level of confidence, unafraid to do anything.” It feels like the fourth season will be a test of whether the show can build its momentum further and become a Succession-level era-defining show.

The fourth season has completed shooting. Trying to extract plot details is fruitless because of how big this show has become. You know something’s a hit when everyone involved clams up about what’s to come. “I can’t. I’m sorry,” says Myha’la. The plot is now so carefully protected that when her fiancé visited the set he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “He’s come to set on the last two seasons, almost every day, and it was like, whatever,” Myha’la says. “This time it was, ‘OK, so we have your NDA for you.’ I was like, ‘What!?’” Armando quietly smiles and shrugs.

It’s likely that Industry will continue beyond its fourth season, given its continued growth and HBO’s ongoing need for tentpole series. “I think all of us would do it for as long as they’ll let us,” says Myha’la, who says she now feels so deeply fused with Harper that she’s like “a really problematic, fucked up friend who needs therapy so bad.”

She’s spent so long in Harper’s shoes, and surrounded by British people, that she’s even started to absorb her world into her own. “I greet people with “you alright?” now,” she laughs. “That’s very British. When I first got here that was so insulting to me. Like, do I not look alright? Do I look like something’s wrong?”

She certainly does not seem like anything is wrong. For Myha’la, right now, everything is very much more than alright. Everything is one big right-swipe, open to endless possibilities.

‘Swiped’ is on Disney+ from September 19

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