Kiernan Shipka and Charlie Heaton Upend Their ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Stranger Things’ Personas With ‘Industry’ Season 4’s Wild Cold Open: “These Are Recognizable People Doing Pretty Unrecognizable Things” 

Industry Season 4 opens with two famous television actors playing characters we’ve never seen before on the HBO show.

**Spoilers for Industry Season 4 Episode 1 “The PayPal of Bukkake,” now streaming on HBO Max**

Charlie Heaton, of Stranger Things fame, and Kiernan Shipka, who grew up as Sally Draper on Mad Men before graduating to the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, kick off Industry‘s fourth season with an eerie, sexy sequence that sets the stage in an endlessly intriguing way.

“Opening the season was, like, fucking crazy! Sorry, pardon my French,” Kiernan Shipka told DECIDER. “But like, it was so cool. It felt so cool. I was so excited.”

Heaton plays Jim Dycker, a financial journalist trying to get an on-the-record interview with someone who works at the payment app company, Tender. Since Shipka’s character, Haley Clay, went to the trouble to send a form reply back to one of his inquiries, Jim spends a night stalking her across London. They play a tantalizing game of cat and mouse that sometimes feels menacing and eventually gets them grinding on each other in a nightclub.

“I look back on those days with so much, so much fondness,” Shipka said. “I think also like being a part of Industry and getting to do a club scene was such a sort of like, ‘Check! I did that, I did that moment!’ It was great. It was super fun.”

After this, Haley invites Jim back to her posh London pad and attempts to hook up with him. She tells him that he can use his mouth on her anyway he wants, bragging about what one of her exes thought of her genitalia before passing out on her own couch.

According to Industry co-showrunner Mickey Down, he and collaborator Konrad Kay were hoping that viewers would find the meta humor in seeing the actors best known as noble Jonathan Byers and little Sally Draper in the high hedonism of their HBO show.

“These are recognizable people doing pretty unrecognizable things for the people they played before, which is really fun,” Mickey Down said. “When we first thought about Kiernan Shipka in this role, that was really quite fun. A little bit of circularity that we’re doing a work-based drama [like Mad Men].”

The next morning, a still fully-dressed Haley wakes up to discover that Jim is still there, lurking in her kitchen. He comes clean as a reporter sniffing out a story about her workplace and Haley freaks out. The situation escalates to the point where she pulls out a knife to force Jim to leave. The already layered sequence only gets more complex for Heaton and Shipka.

“I didn’t know Charlie before and I think he’s so excellent and so, so good in this, and like such a sweet boy,” Shipka said. “And we had a lot of stuff to do in those first moments.”

“I mean, it goes from, you know, wild and sexy to like angry… You kind of don’t know where it’s going and there’s a lot of levels and a lot of stuff to play with,” she said. “By the time that we got to the part of it where I’m like chasing him out of my house with a knife, we’d gotten to know each other already.”

“I think there’s always something so fun about yelling at someone that you know in sort of like an incubated environment. Getting to go at each other when there’s a sense of trust and love and we’re going to laugh about this after.”

Industry Season 4 Episode 1 “The PayPal of Bukkake” is now streaming on HBO Max.