Industry's Harper Stern is the most deliciously chaotic villain on TV

Harper Stern, as expertly portrayed by Myha’la on Industry, is chaos personified. She’s a wrecking ball at the center of the HBO show, less a character at this point than a rogue element who’s ready to destroy everything at any moment. For what purpose? What does she want? Money? Power? Revenge? We used to know—or think we knew—what she was after in the first two seasons of the series. But now, with season three nearly done, her motivations other than destruction are murky at best. That’s the way she probably likes it. Harper is at the height of her powers when everything is tumbling to the ground around her. And she is, to be sure, the most deliciously chaotic villain on TV right now. 

Granted, there are no heroes on Industry. Harry Lawtey’s sweet, naive Robert Spearing comes closest. But part of the joy (and terror) of watching this show is knowing that, like the sometimes inscrutable whims of money itself, these characters will give up what they hold most dear for reasons that have less to do with what they want than what they think they need.

Harper used to be that way back in season one. She was introduced as a recent college graduate, a finance expert hired by the international investment bank Pierpoint & Co. She had a dirty secret (that she never actually graduated from college). And in classic Peak TV form, that spiraled out of control the more she tried to keep that bit of info from her bosses and friends. It was her talent with finance that kept the secret, well, secret even when more and more people found out. But something was bubbling below the surface. The more she got away with, the more chances she took and reckless she became.

A little thing called COVID showed her fear and kept her locked up in a hotel for a good chunk of season two. But once she was out in the world, her experiences with Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass), an erratic hedge-fund manager, taught her to err toward the dark side and continue to push everyone around her—that is, until her lies caught up with her. Eric (Ken Leung), her manager, let her go after it was discovered she faked her college transcript. 

Unfettered by her layoff, Harper has become unstoppable in season three. She worked her way up from glorified assistant to co-owner of a hedge fund in record time. In the process, she publicly humiliated Eric at an international conference and then manipulated her former mentor into allowing her new fund to be managed by Pierpoint. Beyond cowing Eric and punishing him for firing her, she’s now turned her gaze towards Pierpoint itself, attempting to burn the 150-year-old institution to the ground. To do that, Harper has betrayed her new partner, Petra (Sarah Goldberg), repeatedly. Petra, a character that came into the show this season like a shark, thought she could steer the young financier only to discover she’s just chum in the water to Harper Stern. Even worse, Harper manipulated her only friend, Yasmin (Marisa Abela), to find out if she can short Pierpoint, which all leads to Yas getting fired, something that doesn’t seem to faze Harper one bit. And by all rights, Harper may well have obliterated her former employer by the end of Sunday’s episode, “Useful Idiot.” 

Myha’la (Photo: Simon Ridgway/HBO)

Oh, and she also helped Yasmin cover up her father’s death without batting an eye. Which is all to say: If you want to see what a sociopath looks like, look no further than Harper Stern. Yas, for all of her faults, has spent all season torn up about her father’s demise and its repercussions. It’s unclear whether Harper even remembers she was an accessory to a potential murder (Yas’ father accidentally drowned himself, mind you) or even cares.

That’s a good indication of Harper’s supervillain power: turning moments of weakness into points of strength. Every time she loses a client gobs of money or seems to irreparably break a friendship, Harper manages to flip those circumstances upside down. They’re not wins, per se. But her powers of persuasion convince whoever she’s engaging with to trust her even more (and often after being stabbed in the back by her mere moments earlier).

In “Useful Idiot,” there is a helpful visual representation of this power. We first see Harper post-coitus, staring at an enormous bank of screens in the dark. She kicks out the hotel employee she just had sex with and manages to get all the info she needs to obliterate Pierpoint for good out of Rishi (Sagar Radia).  Having fought with her roommate Yas in the previous episode, she’s now back in a hotel. And she has transformed the place of her greatest weakness in season two into a fortress, one where she lords over the world as the Queen of Money.

Let’s contrast Harper with other modern HBO villains like The Penguin‘s Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell). That character is at the beck and call of a massive franchise. With Industry, despite the financial world’s too-big-to-fail attitude, there are no such restraints on Harper. She doesn’t need to set up the next Batman movie or wrestle with a pre-existing source material’s beats. All she’s beholden to is the whims of show creators, Mickey Down and Konard Kay. And so far this season, they’ve let her go full chaotic. 

Early in “Useful Idiot,” Eric tells his boss while discussing how to save Pierpoint, “Let’s not sell our soul just because there’s a gun to our head.” Eric does, of course, by the end of the episode. But when it comes to Harper, it’s unclear whether she had a soul to sell to begin with. As we enter next week’s season finale, she is in a potentially dire situation as an even more dangerous and vicious character, Roger Barclay’s Otto Mostyn, has summoned her to his estate. But somehow, in some way, she’ll turn this moment of weakness into a strength too. And most likely, when season three wraps, she’ll be the one holding the gun.