Interview: Mickey Down and Konrad Kay on ‘Industry’ Season 3
Industry is undoubtedly one of the best shows currently airing on TV. Biting, brazen and incredibly brilliant, it follows a group of recent graduates vying for permanent roles at Pierpoint & Co, a renowned investment bank as they navigate the intense pressures and the hedonistic environment of Pierpoint & Co’s London office, all while giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the opaque world of high finance.
Returning for its highly anticipated third season, this time on HBO’s highly-coveted Sunday night slot, Industry is bolder and bigger than ever; bigger in scale, bigger in starpower (in addition to new castmember Kit Harington, the season features appearances from names such as Joel Kim Booster and Tom Stourton) and bigger in texture, with creators (and now directors) Mickey Down and Konrad Kay coaxing career-best performances out of the show’s ensemble cast, particularly Myha’la, who practically steals the show every time she’s on-screen, Harry Lawtey, Ken Leung and Marisa Abela, who is probably the closest this season has to a lead character.
In Season 3, as Pierpoint looks to the future and takes a big bet on ethical investing, Yasmin (Abela), Robert (Lawtey), and Eric (Leung) find themselves front and center in the splashy IPO of Lumi, a green tech energy company. Since leaving Pierpoint, Harper (Myha’la) is eager to get back into the addictive thrill of finance and finds an unlikely partner in FutureDawn portfolio manager Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg).
“I’d say it’s us writing with the brakes off,” says Down when asked to describe this season. “I think it’s the most ambitious season yet. We are creatively fulfilled by the show because it continues to evolve. We continue to get better as writers. We write about things that we’re interested in way more than we did in season one. I mean, we obviously were interested in season one and season two, but the show was very narrow by design. In season one, it was a show about young people going into the workplace, and for that reason, it was quite subjective to those young people. It was about their experience and the micro-dramas of being on the trading floor; experiencing sexual harassment from your boss, getting a salad order wrong, trying to impress your mentor. That was the stuff that was really interesting about season one.”
“But in season two and three, these characters continue to accrue power and responsibility so we could write about stuff that felt a little bit more high stakes and not make it feel like the show jumped the shark,” he explains. “The ambition on the show was always going to be leveled up in season three. We really wanted to expand the universe of the show and show how Pierpoint fits into the wider political and financial ecosystem, how it’s at the intersection between politics, tech, energy and the media, all that stuff which we allude to a little bit in the first two seasons. But now, we can actually write about that because our characters are mature enough to experience these things themselves. So it wasn’t as cynical as making the show more accessible, it was about where we wanted the drama in the show to lie. So there are slightly more traditional avenues of storytelling; there’s a mystery element to the show now, there’s a love story. The show has always had some kind of interpersonal elements in some respect about the relationships, sexual and otherwise, between the characters but there’s a sort of love triangle aspect to season 3 which didn’t really exist as much in the first two seasons.”
And while the show may be bigger in scope, it’s still just as razor-sharp as it was in its first two seasons, particularly in how it explores its characters, incisively diving into their motivations and complexities with the same intensity, wit and pathos in spite of the bigger scale. “When we first set out to make the show, there’s a version of it that could have very easily been a workplace drama,” says Kay of their decision to value character development above all else. “There could have been a bit of a cookie-cutter approach to character in service of plot. and we ended up kind of by accident doing it other way around. We were very dialed-in on what we were saying about these people; how naturalistic can the performances be? How three-dimensional, small, almost forensic and documentarian can we make their lives feel? Mickey and I are obsessed with this idea of these characters’ inner life and exploring who they are as people, and in a way, plot was subordinate to that. We just got lucky that the first iteration of the show was this small, character-driven thing because it made us pay attention to that stuff.”
“Even when we were doing the big plot mechanics, we realized that so much of the show relies on the strength of the performances,” he says of their decision to focus on character in addition to plot. “We have all of these wonderful actors; we have people like Ken Leung, who has been around forever, and is fantastic and maybe a bit underused. And we were lucky enough to break all these new actors who are all incredibly good as well. This meant that all of the humanity, all of our attention to detail in those scenes was all there; it was there in the casting, it was there in the writing, it was there a dialogue but then we were allowed to mature enough as creators to be like, ‘We can build an enormous story super-structure over these people and allow that to propel us through the thing.’ It gave us the latitude to be more experimental in scenes because HBO would read the scripts and be like, We know where this is going.’ So if Kit [Harington] and Marisa [Abela] want to have this really intimate moment in the shower, that’s something we would try in season one and it would feel unconnected to everything else, whereas in season three, it actually feels really baked-in to the characters and also the start of this huge episodic story, which leads into this enormous, almost courtly drama. So Mickey and I always felt like we were good as writers at the window-dressing; the small, tactile stuff that I think people love in the show, and we had to become slightly more professional to develop a big Rolls-Royce engine. I think the show functions well when both of those things are happening, and that’s why season 3 works.”
The show introduces many new faces to its audience this season, including Sarah Goldberg‘s Petra Koenig, a portfolio manager at FutureDawn who manages to recruit Harper, and Kit Harington‘s Henry Muck, the CEO of green tech energy company Lumi. As Henry, Harington delivers a career-best performance, fearlessly and ferociously diving headfirst into the crux of his character, all while providing a perfect foil to some of the existing, less-privileged characters we see. Harrington became involved after reaching out to Down and Kay to express how big of a fan he was of the show.
“We’d already started writing Henry’s character [when Harington reached out],” says Down. “The show was expanding, so we wanted to show how Pierpoint fit within the wider ecosystem, but also, how does a company of Lumi’s size and ambition come to market and how does Pierpoint facilitate that? And then we thought, ‘Okay, what’s the center of this company? Who’s that character going to be?’ We realized there’s a very prevalent kind of character within the UK business space; this person who’s been to the best schools and the best institutions, has the best MBAs, has incredible connections, and masses and masses of privilege, huge financial backing and flies by the seat of their pants a lot. We thought, ‘Okay, who is the person that’s going to play this character?’ We knew it was someone that needed to bring nuance to that character, because on paper, that character could easily be two-dimensional. And then, in a moment of kismet, Kit contacted us saying he’s a big fan of the show and asked if there was anything he could do in it. At that point, we were halfway through creating the character. We then met with Kit. There weren’t any scripts at that point, so we sent him a bio of what the character was like. He was like, ‘I understand this person!’ We talked about him at length and he asked really, really good questions that made us interrogate the part even more.”
Harington also found it easy to slot into the production despite most of the cast and crew already having known each other for two seasons. “He was on such good terms with everyone,” gushes Down. “He was such a good professional. He was just part of the family immediately. But then he brought something which was unexpected to us; this humor, levity and charm to the role. Obviously, we know Kit is very charming, but on Game of Thrones, he played this incredible superhero-type character. He obviously had vulnerabilities and stuff, but it was just like he was this super earnest character who could do no wrong. And he joked with us that in 10 years of Game of Thrones, he wasn’t allowed to make a single joke. He was like, ‘I’m a funny person, can I please make a joke?’ So we thought, ‘Okay, let’s write humor for this character.’ But he was so incredibly charming, even when he was doing heinous stuff, you kind of understand wheres he’s coming from even if you don’t agree with it. But he also brought this vulnerability to it where he’s just a guy who lost his father when he was young. He’s always been in his shadow and has always been trying to make up for that, so he’s trying to find validation in a lot of quite odd places sometimes. And then he meets someone like Yasmin, who he sees a lot of himself in. It also helps that he’s so recognizable and so you have preconceptions about him; you go into it thinking one thing because of who he is and you end up getting something that’s nuanced, intricate and very three dimensional.”
This season also sheds more light into a character who’s mostly only existed in the shadows of Pierpoint up until this point; the brash, cocksure Rishi, played by Sagar Radia, who has way more to him than initially meets the eye, as we come to find out through a ‘bottle episode’ solely dedicated to him and his (bucketload of) troubles. “He was very much a peripheral character in season one,” explains Kay. “And what happened was, when we were doing the sound design to season two, we came up with this thing to make the sound design more immersive. Rishi was a character who is always on the trading floor so we were writing more and more ADR lines for him to populate. This allowed us to find his voice because it was Mickey and I really writing the most gloves-off, unadulterated version of that kind of dialogue because we were looking for humor. We were looking for shock value. We were looking to capture something of the old machismo of the trading floor. And between season one and season two, sometimes things happen about actors where they watch a performance, and Sagar came back for season 2 and he was in total command of the character, his confidence was through the roof. There was this some kind of weird melding of person and character which happened, which meant that he just he really started to step into the character and his confidence level really shone through, which suited the voice of what we were writing. So we ended up giving him more and more [to do], and then when we were working on season 3, very early on, we had the episodes on the board, and one of them just said ‘Rishi episode,’ like a bottle episode. We had no idea what it was going to be about. We just knew that we wanted to explore what it would look like if we followed this guy for 48 hours. We also just wanted to try and see if we could sustain an hour of tension.”
As for what’s to come in the future, Down says they just want to entertain their audience while also creating a show that’s ultimately true to them as creatives. “We never know if we’re getting another season,” he says. “So we wanted to throw everything at the wall while also having a really satisfying conclusion that’s also slightly unexpected and that really entertains people. Our only obligation is to entertain people. The most important thing is to entertain, and that was always the crux of what we were trying to do in season three.”
Industry returns for its third season tonight on HBO and Max.
Ahmad W.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.