On a Monday night in November 2020, HBO premiered a series called “Industry” to relatively little fanfare. Set in the cutthroat world of finance in London, the drama starred largely young, unknown actors playing young, unproven college graduates freshly released onto the trading floor of a fictional bank called Pierpoint. The show was lousy with sex, drugs and the kind of bad decisions people make in their 20s, and it received favorable if not ecstatic reviews. Still, a month into its run, HBO renewed it for a second season, confident “Industry” just needed time to find its audience.
Which it did: The buzz steadily grew so that by the time the series moved into HBO’s hallowed Sunday-night slot for its Season 3 debut last summer, viewership had increased by almost 90% over the 2020 series premiere and by 60% over 2022’s Season 2 premiere. Eventually, an average of 1.6 million viewers tuned into each episode across all platforms. That’s hardly the 5 million pairs of eyes “Succession” averaged in its second season, but it was clear that the series full of impenetrable finance jargon dreamed up by two untested British ex-bankers had broken through. And while the first two seasons were ignored by Emmy voters, reviews for Season 3 were better than ever and awards recognition no longer seems out of the realm of possibility.
“It’s massively satisfying. It feels like the show grew up concurrently with us growing up as writers,” said one of those former bankers, Mickey Down, who created “Industry” with his fellow Oxford grad Konrad Kay after they realized how “ill-suited” they were for the finance world. “The first two seasons, as much as I love them, were us trying to figure out how to write the show and the correct speed for it. So, yeah, we’re over the moon.”
Kay emphasized the significance of the time-slot move. “Very few things matter in TV anymore, but I think HBO Sunday night still has quite a lot of cultural relevance,” he said. “More people were paying attention to it, and that coincided really well with the fact that it was the best version of the show to be in this shop window at that time.”
The third go-round was “Industry”’s most ambitious — and pulpiest — yet. In addition to the vicissitudes of money and power, Season 3 tackled a suspicious death, a murder, mental illness, gambling addiction, sexual predation and more. The stories delved deeper into the messy lives of the core characters, whose moral compasses went askew long ago: Harper (Myha’la), a brilliant, often reckless finance maverick from the States; Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a publishing heiress turned mediocre trader; Robert (Harry Lawtey), a finance bro with a conscience; Rishi (Sagar Radia), a foulmouthed trader evading a gangster collecting on a debt; and Eric (Ken Leung), an American Pierpoint exec in the throes of a midlife crisis whose complicated relationship with his former protégée Harper turns explosive.
They were joined this season by two Emmy-nominated actors from the HBO stable: “Barry”’s Sarah Goldberg as Petra, a prickly portfolio manager who launches a hedge fund with Harper, and “Game of Thrones”’ Kit Harington as Henry, an aristocrat who hides his depression behind his silver-tongued bluster and ends the season engaged to Yasmin.
We stopped trying to be too self-serious. I always think the show has worked best when it’s almost like a black comedy.
Co-creator Konrad Kay
The crowded cast of characters crisscross each other in an elegant matrix of storylines that probe the series’ fundamental question of what it means to be a human working in a capitalist pressure cooker that values nothing but money — and how race, age, gender and social class factor into that experience. Or, as Lawtey put it, “For me, its central thesis is this quandary of being the person that you wish to be and doing the things that you want to do, and whether there’s a synergy between those two ambitions. What’s the debate between your personality and your profession, and are those two things compatible?”
It’s heady stuff, but Down and Kay have learned the importance of humor. (See: two grown men wrestling in a children’s ball pit.) “We stopped trying to be too self-serious,” Kay said. “There were moments of gravity and moments of heft and moments of soberness, but then there’s just some really dumb stuff in it as well — silly and irreverent. I always think the show has worked best when it’s almost like a black comedy.”
Season 3 was juicy all right. Here, the “Industry” creators and cast break down some of their favorite scenes.
Harper and Eric Spew Venom
One of the richest relationships in “Industry” is between Harper and Eric. But because Eric fires her at the end of Season 2, they share only a few scenes in Season 3, including one in Episode 3, “It.” Harper and Petra hire Pierpoint to manage their fund, and at a break- fast meeting, Harper makes sure Eric knows he’s now answering to her as a client. She demands eye contact. Reluctantly, he obliges. “It’s no one feeling with her. It’s always a rainbow,” Leung said. “From the first interview, he recognizes something of himself in her. So there’s also a pride there — like, I made this (person). So for that scene, as far as the looking/not looking (at Harper), there’s somebody in my personal life, a family member that has been hard to deal with, and I pictured that person.”
Their encounter in Episode 6 is even more venomous. After Eric learns that Harper’s machinations have essentially bankrupted Pierpoint, he storms into her office. “You’ve got Daddy’s attention now,” he fumes, before calling her a monster. “I heard your family fell apart,” she calmly replies.
“I have so much love for Ken. He is a genius, and I’m always learning something new from him,” Myha’la said, echoing the awestruck praise that many of the younger Industry cast members employ when speaking about the seasoned Leung, whose 30 years of cred- its include ABC’s “Lost,” the Marvel series “Inhumans” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” (Appropriately, Lawtey calls him a “Jedi.”) “We had spent four-and-a-half, almost five months not working together and I missed him,” she said. “We missed each other. The explosion that they were feeling, we were also feeling, with the opportunity to work together.
“The breakfast table, that’s just a tease,” she continued. “When they finally get to confront each other and say the things that they’ve been thinking and feeling for so long and let all that hurt out, it was really fun. Working on the scene wasn’t terribly long, probably an hour-ish. But the beauty about long-form television over many years, those of us who’ve been on the show from the beginning, we have now learned Mickey and Konrad’s rhythm to a T.”
And it won’t be the last encounter between those two. (Season 4 is now in production.) “I don’t see them ever ending,” Leung said. “It’s almost like an ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. That’s a metaphor for their relationship.”
Rishi Bottoms Out, Then Gets Self-Reflective
One of the best episodes of Season 3 is the fourth, “White Mischief,” which is devoted entirely to Rishi. We learn that the brash trader known for his offensive jokes and hyper-masculinity has amassed several hundred thousand pounds in gambling debt. Returning home bloodied and bruised after an all-nighter, he confesses to his wife, Diana (Emily Barber), just how deep in the hole he is. They throw plates and hurtful words before eventually settling down. As Rishi looks at his sleeping baby boy, Diana delivers a devastating line: “It’s easier to raise strong boys than fix broken men.”
“I’m crying and crouching over the baby’s cot and she says that line about raising strong men,” Radia said. “That got me. I think it was a really, really important scene to see how far Rishi had come in terms of his downfall. And it’s probably one of the most vulnerable places we see him, which I liked because you never see him that way.” Moments later, as he’s getting ready for bed, Rishi asks Diana if he is a misogynist, which he’d been called earlier at work.
“He’s genuinely contemplating who he is as a man, who he wants to be as a man. It’s a question he’s asking because I think he genuinely doesn’t feel he is that.” (The peace is short-lived. Spoiler alert: The loan shark later shoots Diana in the head when Rishi fails to pay his debt.)
Yasmin Confronts her Father
The season begins with a mystery: What happened to Yasmin’s reprehensible father (Adam Levy) while they were vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean? We finally get an answer in Episode 6, “Nikki Beach, or: So Many Ways to Lose.” Though it’s never spelled out explicitly, there are indications throughout the series that Yasmin was abused by her father. On the yacht, she unloads a lifetime of pain and vilifies him for sexualizing her and failing her in every possible way. He calls her a “fucking whore,” to which she replies: “I wish you would fucking die.” He then falls overboard and a shocked Yasmin does not turn the yacht around to rescue him.
“I like to work with objectives as much as I can: What is it that Yasmin wants out of this scene?” said Abela, who recently appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller “Black Bag.” “Yasmin is usually quite good at playing to win a scene. She’s good at manipulating people into doing what she wants. In this scene, she doesn’t know how to win with her father. He’s one of the only relationships in her life that she has no idea how to navigate. So it’s difficult, as an actor, to play an objective badly.”
When shooting the scene, Abela drew on the idea that Yasmin is not just trying to hurt her father; she’s also trying to get him to love her despite the years of abuse — which is, she said, “so much more heartbreaking. For me, that was the most interesting choice to make as an actor. Like, what does it look like if a young woman is begging her father to love her and apologize to her, but the only way she knows how to do it is to scream and cry because she can’t reach him?”
Harper and Yasmin Come to Blows
Their thorny friendship hits its nadir in Episode 6. After Eric fires Yasmin for inadvertently helping Harper sabotage Pierpoint, she confronts Harper about the deception, which leads to an unleashing of insults that tap into each of their deepest fears: for Yasmin, that she’s a worthless sex object, and for Harper, that she’s a soulless beast who feeds on people’s pain. When Harper calmly says, “You’re a talentless fucking whore,” echoing Yasmin’s father, Yasmin slaps her. Harper slaps her back.
“Some people are like, ‘Oh my God! How do you guys do that? Was it so hard?’” Myha’la said. “And I was like, ‘No, honestly. We’re best friends, and any actor, it’s like crack to us when we see a crazy blowout scene on a page.’” In Down and Kay’s initial conception of the scene, Harper doesn’t deliver a retaliatory slap. But that didn’t sit well with Myha’la: “Originally, Yasmin hits Harper and then Harper calls her a whore, which was meant to feel worse to Yas than getting slapped in the face. And I said to them, ‘I know for a fact that if someone put their hands on me, you crossed the line. I’m certainly not going to let you get the last lick in.’ Both of them had to do the lowest thing to keep them on an even playing field. I just couldn’t imagine ever speaking to her again if I let her hit me and didn’t hit her back. Harper needed to sink that low, too.
Robert Tells Yasmin to Stop Playing Games
Working-class Robert has pined for privileged princess Yasmin since Season 1. Her feelings are mutual, but she can only express them through manipulative mind games. In Episode 7, “Useful Idiot,” the two go on a road trip from London to Wales (which is where the show actually shoots). They’re sitting on a pier in Cardiff one night and Yasmin starts in with her flirty play. But he shuts it down, telling her it’s OK to be vulnerable.
“It’s a really shocking moment in the grammar of the show, because characters don’t do that very often,” said Down, who, with Kay, made his directorial debut with the episode. “Obviously, the show is very shocking in many, many ways, and it’s provocative. But the idea that there’s actually a space for romance in the world of “Industry” is one of the most shocking things about that episode because it’s not something we veer to very often.
“Me and Konrad are quite soft at heart,” he added with a laugh, “which people are quite surprised by, considering the show that we make.”
The scene was especially important for Lawtey, who is not returning for Season 4 due to scheduling conflicts and because Robert’s story has reached its natural end (at least for now). “There was so much at stake with those scenes,” he said. “I cared about that period of filming as much as I ever cared about any acting in my
life, really. That was quite a burden to carry — completely self-inflicted, by the way — and it certainly made work very pressurized, but also really, really joyful because it was just me and Marisa, one of my best friends. It felt like we were making a little film together.
“The whole show is a coming-of-age story, and that moment is emblematic of Robert’s maturity,” he continued. “Robert grows up a lot over the course of the show — he grows up and is ground down at the same time — and in that process becomes a lot more sensitive and a lot more frail. It’s quite the trajectory and it’s been a real privilege for me.”
This story originally ran in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
