Kiernan Shipka Came of Age as Sally Draper. Now Shes Grown Up Enough for Industry

Kiernan Shipka didn’t just act as a child — she grew up inside one of the most canonized dramas of the modern TV era. For seven seasons on Mad Men, she played Sally Draper, the watchful daughter taking in the adult mess around her: the drinking, the lies, the infidelity. Now, nearly two decades later, she’s back on Sunday night television, participating in the drinking, the lies and the infidelity on Industry, HBO’s gleefully amoral finance drama.

The 26-year-old actress’ arrival is part of a near-total overhaul of the show as it enters its fourth season. Pierpoint, the fictional bank that once anchored Industry, has been dismantled, leaving only Myha’la, Marisa Abela and Ken Leung from the original cast. In their place are new power centers and new players, including Max Minghella as the CEO of a Venmo-like startup called Tender — with Shipka stepping in as his assistant, a role that turns out to be far more consequential than it appears.

Shipka hadn’t even seen Industry when her agents first floated the opportunity. But the show’s reputation — especially for its willingness to depict sex, drugs and ethical gray zones — preceded it, and the audition material sealed the deal. “The sides were crazy,” she says.

The timing didn’t hurt, either. After Mad Men, Shipka spent four seasons headlining Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, an Archie-adjacent Netflix adaptation that built a solid-enough genre fan base but didn’t quite reposition her as a serious grown-up actress. When it wrapped, Shipka found herself thinking more deliberately about what she wanted the next phase of her career to look like, gravitating toward more overtly adult material, including parts in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs and Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl.

Still, the stretch after Sabrina wasn’t entirely clarifying. Even as she took on darker parts, Shipka still found herself figuring things out. That’s when a mentor offered a suggestion: Step back and live a little. “To have fun, make mistakes, get messy — and let that feed back into the work,” she recalls.

That advice landed differently for someone whose version of “growing up” had already unfolded on a studio lot. Though she was born in Chicago, Shipka moved to Los Angeles at age 6, shortly before starting Mad Men, and came of age inside a working television set, where co-stars blurred into family friends. Jon Hamm showed up at her birthday parties. Timothée Chalamet spent time living in her family’s guest house after they met on the set of an indie film. Hollywood wasn’t a distant industry she entered later — it was the backdrop of her adolescence.

In a strange bit of timing, that backdrop has suddenly come back into view. Mad Men has recently landed on HBO Max, introducing Sally Draper to a whole new generation of viewers. “What’s incredible about Mad Men is that people are still finding it,” Shipka says. “On top of being known as the kid from the show, there are also a lot of people watching it now and ‘discovering’ a 6-year-old version of me for the first time.”

Clearly, one of the things that appealed to Shipka about Industry was the chance for people to meet a very different version of her. Her character, Hailey, initially registers as a familiar presence before revealing a far more pivotal role in the show’s evolving power structure. The details of that arc will be gradually breadcrumbed through the season — audiences won’t get the full picture right away — although Shipka says she couldn’t wait to learn the plot twists. She pressed Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay for answers. “They indulged me,” she says, “so I always knew where she was headed.”

Whatever narrative curveballs the role required, the experience of making the show was anything but fraught. That was particularly the case during the filming of a sequence in which Shipka found herself dancing to a New Order tune in a London nightclub. Scenes like that — which require actors to simulate abandon while a full crew looks on — can be excruciating to film. On Industry, though, they found a way to make it feel closer to the real thing. The production rented out a nightclub in Cardiff, Wales, where the series shoots, and brought in DJ friends to re-create an actual night out.

“The rehearsal was awkward,” Shipka says. “But when we actually filmed, it was surreal how fun it was.”

This story appeared in the Jan. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.