Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Actress Myha’la Herrold began acting in community theater in San Jose, Calif., at age 6. And while she auditioned for 10 colleges, Carnegie Mellon University’s musical theater program was at the top of her wish list.

“I came to visit, and I was blown away by Pittsburgh and the whole (CMU) campus,” she said. “The people were the most well-rounded theater people I had ever met, with ambitions outside of just theater and the program and the campus integrated in that way so the exposure was really great. And Pittsburgh was a lovely place to go to college in. It’s not like Ann Arbor where everything is about the school — there are still clubs and bars and shopping and it’s beautiful.”

So how did a theater kid and 2018 CMU grad end up off the stage and in front of the camera, starring as the lead in HBO’s London-set banking drama “Industry,” which returns for its second season at 9 p.m. Monday?

“(CMU drama students) do a showcase in New York, and my current manager came to see my showcase. We started talking and working together, and she’s out in L.A., and mostly on the TV/film side. She was sending me what she was getting, and there was so much more opportunity (in broadcast, cable and streaming) for me as a young, mixed (race) person,” Herrold said. “At the time, I had a shaved head and so I was looking kind of androgynous. I was auditioning still for plays and musicals, but that industry is even more difficult to get in the door. I was doing callbacks, but I wasn’t booking anything — and then ‘Industry’ came along.”

Herrold shot the first season of “Industry” pre-covid and season two mid-pandemic.

“Once I got there, I kind of discovered that maybe I found my niche,” Herrold said of landing a TV gig. “One of the notes I got a lot (at CMU) was that I’m not loud enough and I’m not big enough to reach the back of the house (in a theater). But for the camera, it (works).”

In the show, a year has passed since the first season. Herrold plays Harper Stern, an American who works alongside young bankers in a drug-and-sex-fueled environment as they try to bring in new business for Pierpoint Co., which is planning to close one of its offices, possibly the London branch.

Season two begins with Harper still working remotely post-covid, reluctant to return to the office with her co-workers for fear of facing some of them after the events of season one.

“She’s grown up a little bit — I don’t necessarily mean in maturity — but she’s had a year in a pandemic and a year away from home and she has one year of work under her belt, similar to me as a human being,” Herrold said. “So the things that Harper comes into the office with, I also come into my office with. I feel sure now I can do this. I know who this character is. I can feel comfortable and confident and happy.”

Herrold often was paired in season one with Ken Leung (“Lost”), the show’s most veteran series regular who played a mentor of sorts to Harper, and their interplay was a highlight of the season.

“Ken Leung was in the original Broadway production of ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie,’ which I only discovered in the second season,” Herrold said enthusiastically. “So there was one scene we were filming and it was just the two of us on the trade floor and we were doing a rehearsal, and he just started singing the lines. So we were singing in the scene and Konrad, one of our writers, was like, ‘Dang, we really should have shot that. It was fabulous.’ ”

This season, Herrold also shares scenes with Jay Duplass, who plays a new character. And yes, they talked about their shared Pittsburgh experiences (Duplass starred in Netflix’s filmed-in- Pittsburgh Sandra Oh series “The Chair.”)

“I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you were in Pittsburgh? I love Pittsburgh,’ ” Herrold said. “It’s truly a great place to work and go to school.”

Herrold said college didn’t give her a lot of preparation for on-camera work (“Until you’re on a set doing it, there’s not much that can prepare you. Doing is the best learning,” she said), but every script she receives, regardless of the medium, she approaches using techniques she picked up at CMU.

“It’s the same way I interrogate or interact with a script, the same way I break it down. The same way I build a character. All of the exercises and techniques that we’ve learned have come to my advantage at some point,” she said. “Particularly my movement class with Catherine Moore, which helped me find (Harper’s) physicality in her anxiety. Re-creating a panic attack is hard to do. And it’s uncomfortable to do and your body sort of fights it. So using techniques that I learned from her class were super-helpful to both get me into it and get me out of it.”

In June, Herrold wrapped a role in Netflix’s Sam Esmail-d irected film “Leave the World Behind,” starring Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon and Mahershala Ali. And she wants to one day, preferably sooner than later, return to the stage.

“It’s been a minute, so I’m gonna need a little help, but (the stage) was my first love and I would love to do it again when the right project comes along,” she said.

Having starred in an HBO series no doubt will open doors in the theater world that were not opening to her previously.

“Fingers crossed,” Herrold said. “Isn’t it amazing that a TV gig can get you a job easier on Broadway than actually just being good at what you do?”

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