Marisa Abela makes social confidence look like something her characters have to keep working at. We rate her most when charm has an edge: she can make a compliment sound like a challenge, and keep us interested without asking for approval.
Fi1m perspective
At the dinner table in Black Bag (2025), Marisa Abela's Clarissa Dubose says whatever comes into her head. She is the youngest there, a satellite-feed watcher among spies, and Abela makes that lack of caution funny. Tom Burke gives her an older boyfriend who drinks too much; she gives Steven Soderbergh's ensemble a welcome impatience with polite conversation. It is a good use of an actor whose characters need not behave well to hold our attention.
Industry (2020) gives that quality more room through Yasmin Kara-Hanani, one of the young bankers whose ambition makes the working day so uncomfortable. Abela and Myha'la, as Harper Stern, reward creators and writers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay for leaving their characters complicated. Abela does not ask us to like Yasmin before following her. The programme's sex and excess can distract from the office politics, but her performance helps keep us watching.
The lead in Back to Black (2024) brought a different burden: playing Amy Winehouse without making recognition the whole point. Abela has the walk and the sideways look, and turns a compliment into something close to a challenge. We were won over when she stood in a small club and quietened the crowd, because we believed in her ability to hold them there. By then, checking her against the familiar footage had stopped being interesting.
Her singing is her own, though it lacks the low, heavy pull of Winehouse's records. Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Matt Greenhalgh give her a love story too soft on its characters, and her performance cannot correct that. We rated the film poorly, not the performance. Abela makes Amy convincing enough that the film's gentleness becomes more frustrating.
For a first look, choose Black Bag: Soderbergh gives her room to be sharp and funny without having to carry the film. Then try Industry for the longer acquaintance. We would welcome another leading role, preferably in a film willing to be harder on its characters.
Biography
Marisa Abela is a British actress. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2019 and first appeared on screen as a child in the 2008 thriller Man in a Box.
Abela is known for her role as Yasmin Kara-Hanani in the BBC Two and HBO series Industry (2020–), for which she won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress. She played Amy Winehouse in the 2024 biographical film Back to Black, appeared in Barbie (2023) and Rogue Agent (2022), and portrayed Clarissa Dubose in Black Bag (2025). She also had a role in the series COBRA (2020). Abela was named a 2023 Screen International Star of Tomorrow.
