How Myha’la Herrold Succeeds in Showbiz (2024)

HBO’s Industry, a workplace drama with a side of cocaine, makes one of the best cases for never returning to the office. The bankers and traders at Pierpoint & Co. are paragons of HR misconduct. They curse, they f*ck, they snort, they puff, they throw each other under the bus. At the center of the chaos is Harper Stern, played by 26-year-old newcomer Myha’la Herrold. She’s an American in London, trying to prove her worth in a cutthroat business. I imagine she never finished her onboarding workplace training videos. Harper has better sh*t to do.

Herrold’s Harper moves with the energy of two kids stacked on top of each other under a trench coat, a knife tucked into a sleeve. She operates on the defensive. She’s cold until she needs to be charming. She’s charming until she needs to be sociopathic. Before getting cast in the show, Herrold was on track to start a career doing what she trained for at Carnegie Mellon University: live theater. She’d made it to the Jimmy Awards (the Tonys for high school teens) after being recognized for performances in her hometown of San Jose, California. She had a leg of a national tour for Book of Mormon under her belt. But when the breakout TV role came knocking, Herrold found herself putting a pin in the vision she had about doing eight shows a week on Broadway.

A second season of Industry returns August 1. She appears in the upcoming A24 horror-comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies. And she’s working on a Netflix film adaptation of the Rumaan Alam novel Leave the World Behind, alongside Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali. Herrold is self-assured, and a sponge. If she does find her way back to the stage, she tells me, it’ll be because she’s energized by a story—that it presents an opportunity to learn, to expand, to show a new side of what she’s capable of.

COVID changed our plans to meet in person, so Herrold and I spoke over a video call as she recovered and quarantined in a hotel on Long Island. She told me she’d been watching Legendary from bed to pass the time. I gave her my best Leiomy Maldonado impression. And that’s what happens when you put a couple theater kids in a Zoom room.

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When I heard that you were feeling sick, I was like, she should go to bed. The auntie in me came out!

I am very much alone, so I don’t mind the company, you know?

So I want to start with—and I really want you to forgive me for this—a YouTube video of you singing “Girl on Fire” by Alicia Keys.

Oh, [laughs], you know what, you know what…I might as well get this sh*t out there and be done with it. There’s a YouTube [channel] and I’m tagged in a lot of things. The YouTube was attached to an old email from high school that’s been disabled. There’s a lot of things on the internet that I’m responsible for that I just can’t get rid of. No disrespect to 14-year-old me.

I wanted to ask you about this video because it’s from 2013, you’re in high school, about to go off to Carnegie Mellon. I’m wondering what teenage Myha’la was seeing for herself at the time?

I always knew I wanted to do musical theater. I was like, I wanna sing, I wanna be on stage. That’s what I’m gonna do. And I had no idea that’s what everyone else wanted to do. The competition was insane. But I didn’t know any of that. So I sort of went into it with almost no fear. It wasn’t until I did Industry that I felt that, oh, maybe this is more my speed. A note I got a lot in school was, “We can’t hear you or see you in the back row.” And I was like, I’m feeling my fantasy. That should be good enough!

It feels like the kind of song that the writers of Smash probably looked to when they were writing all of their 11 o’clock numbers.

Very much. And at the end of it, it goes all the way up the damn piano and you’re belting for your whole life. That was my bread and butter.

There are so many aspects of studying theater at a place like Carnegie Mellon that we could get into. But I’m interested in the things you were taught that you rejected. Were there things about becoming an actor, training for that world, that you felt like weren’t really for you?

All of the Black students in the drama program do what we call a family dinner once a month, and we get together and we bring food, we cook, we eat, we commiserate, and we dance and have a good time. One of the things that we talked about often was how we felt classical acting and theater training was not for us because it wasn’t created with us in mind. There seems to be this element of the training that I feel like is born out of Method that says if you, the person—not the character—are not really suffering in some way for your art or otherwise, it’s not enough. And I simply said no, I’m not gonna put my body through some extra sh*t to impress some professor. I better be well-rested, fully fed, and happy.

Tell me about your experience at the Jimmy Awards.

I was super excited. Leslie Odom Jr. was my coach. And one of the first things we did when we all got in our groups is we all sang the songs that we chose to compete with. I think I went last. The second I heard these other people sing, I felt the most severe imposter syndrome I’d ever felt. I was really afraid to sing. I think I asked Leslie not to. I got really emotional. He was like, Just sing. You’re gonna be fine. You’re here for a reason. Sing. I felt like a big fish in a small pond in San Jose. And when I got to New York, I was like, a very small fish in a big-ass pond, full of big-ass fish. But that was the moment that I think I took Leslie’s advice and just decided that I’m where I’m supposed to be, no matter what. I’m here for a reason.

What did you perform?

I sang “Home” from The Wiz. I cried the whole time. But all of these things, “Home” and that song “I’m a Star,” I don’t think I knew it in the moment, but it was very much reflective of what I was going through or where I was coming from and what I was hoping to do.

This is me being super corny, but you were home! In translating where you feel most at home onstage into your performance on television, what do those dials look like for you? What are you shifting?

Honestly, I think most of it was completely ditching damn near everything I had learned. What we learn in school is how to amplify all of [our] movements, our voices, whatever, in a way so that we can reach everyone in the house, but remains true and honest storytelling. And we’re taught how to repeat that. I realized I could just let go of the technique part. And once I did that, it started to look more natural and it was more comfortable for me in the end. You just have to feel it. I know it sounds corny, but if you feel it, it’s gonna appear on your face.

We’re both being corny today. I think it’s OK.

I’m full of corn. Corn and cheese. So it’s all good.

I’m full of like, oxtail and plantains.

[laughs] Nice! Good.

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How did you discover Harper as a character? Were there inspirations?

Well, honestly, when I first read those [audition scenes], I just did my version of some hard-ass person in an office. And then I got the scripts to do a second read and I was like, I have no idea what it is they’re talking about. Not a single clue. But I do know what is happening to them. They’ve been thrown into the adult world alone. They’re now trying to get an entry-level job in their career. And all they have to do is prove their worthiness. And once they get it, they have to hold onto it, which is exactly where I was in my life. I kind of [felt like] a small child putting on their adult parents’ clothes and then being told to behave like an adult. So I translated my circ*mstances into the finance world.
Also, I am very much [a] “fake it until you make it” kind of gal. An “I’m gonna never let ’em see you sweat” kind of gal. My mom always told me that. So I was walking into these rooms like I owned them and sweating profusely, my heart beating out of my chest. I felt like Harper was doing the very same thing. She’s really insecure. She’s afraid of being found out. And I was like, well, there’s no way in hell a Black woman’s gonna walk into a bank and let them know that she’s feeling insecure. She makes herself undeniable.

You have the benefit of being someone who people are being introduced to in a lot of ways. What do you care about doing right now?

I would really love to play a person in love. As logical and pragmatic and work-focused and sort of stern as I can be, I am equal parts a romantic person. Love guides my life. All of my stuff thus far has definitely had a bit of androgyny or a bit of a ruling masculine energy to it. I wouldn’t mind giving my femme side a platform for a moment.

Is there an actor right now that you look to as a barometer or possibility model?

I wanna have Mark Ruffalo’s career. And I’ve been working with Julia Roberts and she’s amazing—I want her career. The breadth of stuff that they’ve done. The range! I want that. I want to do a movie musical. I want to do a lot of things!

I think it might be fair to say that, in the spirit of being theater kids, we kind of want our own career. We want our own future. It sounds like you’re saying: I want Myha’la Herrold’s career.

I want to do it my way. It’s very Aries of me, but it’s true.