{"id":2251006,"date":"2026-01-26T13:53:32","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T13:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2251006"},"modified":"2026-01-26T13:53:32","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T13:53:32","slug":"kiernan-shipka-knew-a-racy-scene-in-industry-would-get-people-talking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/kiernan-shipka-knew-a-racy-scene-in-industry-would-get-people-talking\/","title":{"rendered":"Kiernan Shipka knew a racy scene in ‘Industry’ would get people talking"},"content":{"rendered":"

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New York\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/span>Most of the time, Kiernan Shipka isn\u2019t thinking about how fans are going to react to a scene when she\u2019s reading scripts. And she\u2019s had practice. Shipka got her start when she was just 6 years old on \u201cMad Men,\u201d a series filled with the kind of jaw-dropping sequences made for water cooler conversation.<\/p>\n

But when Shipka read the wild menage a trois her character Haley has in the third episode of Season 4 of \u201cIndustry,\u201d which aired Sunday, she knew it was going to explode on the internet. \u201cI looked at that scene and went, yeah, that\u2019s going to get people talking,\u201d she deadpans in the HBO offices one January afternoon, before breaking out into a giggle.<\/p>\n

At 26 years old, Shipka has grown up onscreen. On AMC\u2019s \u201cMad Men\u201d we watched her, as Sally Draper, turn from an adorable little girl to an angsty youth, well aware of her father\u2019s transgressions. Shortly after, Shipka graduated to playing the title teenage witch in Netflix\u2019s \u201cChilling Adventures of Sabrina<\/a>.\u201d But even she admits that her role on the buzzy HBO drama feels like a turning point in her already long career.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t necessarily saying at the beginning of last year I wanted to play something that\u2019s more mature and more adult, but I think I did,\u201d she says. \u201cI think deep down I wanted to do something that felt more in-line with being what 25 at the time felt like to me. I felt like a person who was an adult in the world and I wanted to play one.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kiernan Shipka as Haley in Season 4 of \u201cIndustry.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Simon Ridgway\/HBO)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

But Haley also isn\u2019t exactly an easy nut to crack, which is what makes Shipka\u2019s performance so intriguing. Three episodes in and we still don\u2019t exactly know what her deal is. She works for Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), the founder of Tender, an app that has aspirations for being a bank in your pocket despite its history as a payment processor for OnlyFans-type porn sites. Haley is a party girl, whose job is seemingly to follow Whitney around, booking his cabs, travel and perhaps more nefarious dealings.<\/p>\n

But Haley is also savvy, especially when it comes to sex, and she finds an opening when Yasmin (Marisa Abela)<\/a> invites her into her bedroom while they are staying at an Austrian castle for some important schmoozing with the fascist owner of a bank. (The castle, for what it\u2019s worth, was actually located in Wales.) Yasmin encourages Haley to get it on with her husband Henry Muck (Kit Harington), the CEO of Tender, before asking Haley to spread her legs. Then she joins in herself. (Yes, this does mean that Sally Draper and Jon Snow are making out onscreen; No, Shipka hadn\u2019t met Harington before when they were on their former long-running TV shows.) As is tradition for \u201cIndustry,\u201d the scene is provocative but it\u2019s about more than just titillation: As Haley and Yasmin watch each other, you can see a game of one-upmanship unfolding. It\u2019s just unclear exactly what cards someone like Haley is holding.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she knows how powerful sex is,\u201d Shipka says. \u201cShe knows that because of her own experience and going into that situation, whatever the outcome of it ends up being, I think she has in her head: \u2018This is probably going to be good for me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Haley is a new type of character for \u201cIndustry\u201d co-creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down<\/a>. Unlike pretty much everyone else on screen, she\u2019s not spewing a bunch of financial jargon. They knew they wanted to cast an American and the idea of hiring a \u201cMad Men\u201d alum was incredibly appealing, considering they are huge fans.<\/p>\n

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In \u201cIndustry,\u201d Shipka\u2019s character Haley shares a provocative scene with Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Henry (Kit Harington). \u201cI think she knows how powerful sex is,\u201d Shipka says.<\/span> (Justin Jun Lee\/For The Times)<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n

\u201cThere was a cosmic circularity in having Don Draper\u2019s daughter do all this crazy stuff,\u201d Down says, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to take an actor that you wouldn\u2019t expect to be in a show like this and sort of put them through the wringer.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Shipka met with Down and Kay over Zoom, she played Haley, who is introduced during a night out clubbing, very drunk. Her voice was very raspy. Down didn\u2019t know whether she was going Method.<\/p>\n

It was actually a twist of fate. The meeting fell during awards season and Shipka had been going out a lot and lost her voice. (Shipka was in last season\u2019s contender \u201cThe Last Showgirl<\/a>\u201d alongside Pamela Anderson.) \u201cThis is not my usual way,\u201d she says, breaking out into laughter. \u201cI answered this Zoom call and it sounded like I\u2019d been partying all night.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was exactly right for Haley, though. Over the course of the season, just what exactly Haley\u2019s deal is becomes clearer, which allowed Shipka to layer elements of her character into the scenes. Still, her slipperiness was something that attracted the actor. Haley is someone who seemingly doesn\u2019t have a lot of power and yet acts as a \u201cpower player.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was really interested in someone who looks at their situation and goes, \u2018I\u2019m going to leverage everything,\u2019\u201d Shipka says. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m going to weaponize what I can. I\u2019m going to scratch my way no matter what. Everything\u2019s a game.\u2019 It\u2019s so opposite to how I think and how I move about life that I was so enticed by the way she moved about the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how does Shipka herself move about the world? With a sense of joy that\u2019s palpable even in the drab office space where we\u2019re conducting our interview. Wearing a black-and-white ensemble that bares her midriff, she tucks her feet under her and treats our chat like a gab session. The next night when we say hello at the \u201cIndustry\u201d premiere party, the celebratory environment is much more suited to her aura.<\/p>\n

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Haley is a character who leverages everything, Shipka says. \u201cIt\u2019s so opposite to how I think and how I move about life that I was so enticed by the way she moved about the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Justin Jun Lee\/For The Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

While playing Sally in \u201cMad Men\u201d was like \u201cgoing to school,\u201d in the years following the show, Shipka started to figure out what worked for her when it came to acting. She started to determine what kind of coaching she liked, and how she wanted to do backstories for her character. The question of whether she wanted to stick with this profession came up from time to time as she was getting older. \u201cBut not for longer than like five minutes, honestly,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She explains she was talking to her mother recently, wondering what she would have done if \u201cMad Men\u201d hadn\u2019t happened. \u201cI kind of thought about it and got really terrified and a little sad,\u201d she says. \u201cBecause I really do feel like this is what I\u2019m meant to be doing and I don\u2019t know how it would have found me if it didn\u2019t happen so early.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Shipka is also not nostalgic for the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s something to be said for frontal lobe development,\u201d she says. \u201cI think my work got more fun the more fun I had in my life, and the more not <\/i>fun I had in my life, too. My work got better the more that I just lived my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before the pandemic, she was working all the time on \u201cSabrina,\u201d which wrapped right before lockdown. Emerging from that, she found a group of friends whom she adores. She went to parties and got heartbroken and had the kind of human experiences that she could funnel into her craft. \u201cI found myself in a lot of really funny situations,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd also I went on my own \u2018Who am I?\u2019 journey, did my therapy, read my self help books.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Shipka, who began acting on \u201cMad Men\u201d at 6, says it\u2019s what she\u2019s meant to do. \u201cI don\u2019t know how it would have found me if it didn\u2019t happen so early.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Justin Jun Lee\/For The Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

When Shipka was filming \u201cIndustry,\u201d which mostly shoots in Wales, she could have gone home multiple times when she wasn\u2019t needed. Instead, she went to London and had herself a \u201cU.K. Girl Summer,\u201d as she says, hitting up Glastonbury where she saw Father John Misty and Charli XCX.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like I got to live in the U.K., and there was something so fun about that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Down describes Shipka as \u201cthe nicest person\u201d he\u2019s probably ever met, who was game for just about everything.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a few days where she actually was sort of a glorified extra, right in the background of the shot, working on Whitney\u2019s desk, pretending to type,\u201d he says. \u201cShe was background for the whole day and just sat there, not one single complaint.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also nailed all of Haley\u2019s nuances, from her naivete to her titillation, including all the character beats in her big sex scene. \u201cIt was a very raw, vulnerable scene for an actor to do,\u201d Kay says. \u201cShe brought a lot of herself to it in more ways than one. Both me and Mickey are really proud of that scene. I think it\u2019s one of the strongest sex scenes we\u2019ve done in the four seasons of \u2018Industry.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

For Shipka, it was her true indoctrination into this wild world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like I was really in the show by that point,\u201d she says. \u201cI was super down.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Most of the time, Kiernan Shipka isn\u2019t thinking about how fans are going to react to a scene when she\u2019s reading scripts. And she\u2019s had practice. Shipka got her start when she was just 6 years old on \u201cMad Men,\u201d a series filled with the kind of jaw-dropping sequences made for water cooler conversation. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2251007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2251006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Kiernan-Shipka-knew-a-racy-scene-in-Industry-would-get.com2F562F242Fb3e608264ac397a985e08258.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2251006"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2251008,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251006\/revisions\/2251008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2251007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2251006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2251006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2251006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}