Kiernan Shipka is telling me about “the novelty of a martini.” Her voice is raspy — she’s been in New York for a week of nonstop press for season four of Industry, and last night, she was out late with friends at People’s, a speakeasy in the West Village — but she’s more than ready for what’s in store today. This afternoon, we’re taking a private martini-making lesson at Damballa, a sleek bar situated between Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, and while the 26-year-old actor is more of a margarita girl, she’s soaking up the opportunity to learn something new. A good stiff drink, she says, “I can always get down with.”
Our instructor, a broad beautiful bartender in his 30s, tells us that what we’re learning is a “life skill,” a sly smile on his face. “Someday, you’re gonna throw a dinner party and you’re gonna want to know how to make this,” he says while showing us the difference between a Hawthorne strainer and julep strainer. Shipka assures him she’s up for the challenge, and as he begins to hand us bottles and glasses, she hangs on to his every last word. “What’s the difference in flavor profile between a shaken and stirred martini?” Shipka asks. (Shaking a cocktail like James Bond, it turns out, is only necessary if you’re adding citrus.) “I am still trying to be the person who loves a martini,” she adds.
Shipka, who was born in Chicago, got her start in commercials. At 6 years old, she asked her parents, who work in real-estate management, if she could move to Los Angeles. They obliged, and she quickly landed a role that would go on to define the next decade of her career: Sally Draper on Mad Men. An only child, Shipka didn’t go to regular school while filming the Emmy-winning series, but she took dance classes with other kids. “All my friends were my age and they weren’t in the business,” she tells me. “I think that’s probably a reason why I didn’t get burnt out, because I didn’t really feel like I was ‘in the biz.’” By the time Mad Men aired its final episode, she was 16. “I started so young, when it wasn’t a job,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about having team calls and agents or anything like that. I was just having fun.”
In 2018, she starred in Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It was Shipka’s first time at the top of a call sheet. Before then, “I wasn’t thinking about my career in a really strategic way,” she says. “From like 14 to 18, I was sort of just figuring stuff out on my own and, and then Sabrina was this totally new, exciting world.” Sabrina offered a foray into elevated teen material, but it wasn’t until she reached her early 20s that Shipka really started to play against type. She snagged parts in Osgood Perkins’s horror film Longlegs and Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, in which she plays a Vegas dancer. But her roles on Sabrina and Mad Men are what really got the attention of HBO casting director Julie Harkin, who knew that when fans saw Shipka’s performance on Industry, a raunchy corporate thriller, they wouldn’t see her as little Sally Draper anymore.
Industry has held a small but steady fan base since its debut during the COVID-19 pandemic. The stakes — and the viewership, which went from 300,000 to 800,000 between seasons one and four — are higher than ever. In seasons three and four, actors from beloved franchises were brought in to be obliterated by finance bros. Last season, Game of Thrones star Kit Harington joined the ranks as Henry Muck, a depressed aristocrat and wannabe businessman. This time, Shipka joined the cast alongside Stranger Things’s Charlie Heaton. She opens the first episode, introducing us to Hayley Clay, an assistant at Tender, a payment processor with (you guessed it) shady dealings. It’s been a slow burn, but her story line descends into something truly grisly by the finale.
For Shipka, joining the cast of Industry was exciting. She wanted to have “a fresh start” playing a more grown-up character but was initially anxious about getting into the mindset of Hayley, whose first appearances involve a drugged-up sex scene and whose true motivations are revealed slowly over time. “I love what I do and I know that I’m good at what I do, but I approach it as if I’m trying to learn from it,” Shipka says. “I have self-confidence that I can do the job, but I always want to feel a little nervous because that’s what makes me put my whole self into it.”
Photo: Katherine Pekala
The first shocking moment of the season occurs when Hayley is seemingly coerced into a threesome with her boss, Henry, and his wife, Yasmin, in episode three. Like all sex on Industry, it’s depraved. Viewers were disturbed, but so far, there’s nothing this show can do that won’t be memed by its fan base. It was a complex scene, but Shipka wasn’t too fazed, she tells me. “I’d done sex scenes in some capacity before, but this one was definitely the most explicit, and the one I knew would be the most seen,” she says. “It’s a very psychological scene, and Hayley is always two steps ahead. We came at it from a character-driven space, so the physicality about it didn’t scare me at all; it felt very safe.”
By the end of the season, it is revealed that Hayley has been in control of her own destiny the entire time. There were clues, of course — this is the same character who suggested snuggling in bed with Yasmin an episode before the threesome and offered a wicked “Thank you, Mommy” while flashing Yasmin in an elevator after the sexual encounter. (“Like, is there chemistry?” Kiernan asks, laughing.) Later, we learn that Hayley’s role as an assistant has always been second to her job as an escort. She was employed by Tender’s manipulative co-founder, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), to lure men into rooms with cameras, and Yasmin and Henry were just another mark. By episode six, Hayley manipulates Whitney, extorting him for half a million dollars.
“Hayley moves through her life pretty much thinking, How can I weaponize this? She’s very calculated and very manipulative and I don’t relate to that at all, but it’s a fun character to play because she’s very cerebral. She’s constantly playing a character,” Shipka says. She pauses for a beat. “I guess in some sort of semi-meta way as an actor, I could relate to her because I play people, and she’s playing different versions of herself.”
In real life, Shipka is a social butterfly and quick to ask questions. She wants to know what I’m doing tonight and, when I reveal I have a date, specifically what I hope the vibes are going to be when I get there. (When it comes to her own romantic life, I get the sense she’d rather keep things private.) She swipes on her phone to show me her array of wallpaper backgrounds. “This one helps me not to overthink,” she says, revealing an image of a well-known meme, two nihilists on a bus. She shows me another: “This is the Earth from the sun,” she says, swiping, “which is a nice, like, here we are … on this little floating rock.” She offers a giggle.
When we pour the rest of our concoction of gin, vermouth, and olive brine from our cocktail shakers into our glasses, Shipka peers down at her coupe, her eyes right above the rim. The pour is just right. “These are nice glasses, too,” she adds, a wide grin on her face. We’re both old enough now that it would be weird to not know how to make a good drink, Shipka says, so we clap, a white Van Cleef ring on her left pointer finger glinting in the dim bar light as she grabs for her glass to take a sip.
Photo: Katherine Pekala
Most childhood actors experience burnout or breakdowns. Shipka says she has suffered neither. She has a varied social life — she counts her castmate Marisa Abela as one of her good friends and attended her wedding last summer. “There was a moment in my early 20s where I started experiencing a new side of set, which was hanging out and making friends,” Shipka says. “Obviously as a kid, I wasn’t going out with the cast of Mad Men,” she adds, laughing. She didn’t realize how big her community had gotten in L.A. until a recent holiday party. “I invited every person that came to mind, and there were so many people that you wanted to see in a room together and never thought that you would,” she says. “There were my childhood friends and my actor friends, writers, and musicians. That was just a moment where I realized I had accumulated a lot of different friends.”
Her calendar is always stacked, but especially so when she’s in New York. Later, she’ll head back to her hotel before meeting friends for dinner at Via Carota. Dinner with her friend group is always a must, she tells me, though she’s also down to be spontaneous. “We’ll do novelty moments,” she says. “We went to the Cheesecake Factory, which was really fun. We go to dinner and then we say, ‘What’s the move?’”
Her career, however, is where she sticks to a plan. “I’ve fallen in love with acting in a whole new kind of way in my 20s,” Shipka tells me, tucking her feet up under her legs, grabbing the martini glass and setting it back down without taking a sip. “I had to go and live my life and be a person so that I could take that back into the work.” The result? “The parts that I’m playing now are complicated in a way that I can wrap my head around because I’ve got more life in me.” Shipka has no regrets about growing up as a child star in Los Angeles, though she knows that’s a rare state of mind for most grown-up former child actors. “The idea of my life and my early childhood not unfolding the way that it did is really scary to me,” she says. “I really feel like when I look back on this period of my life, Industry will be a very defining part.”
Production Credits
Photography by
Katherine Pekala
Special Thanks
Damballa
The Cut, Editor-in-Chief
Lindsay Peoples
The Cut, Photo Director
Noelle Lacombe
The Cut, Photo Editor
Sofía Mareque
The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor
Brooke Marine
Related