SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 3 premiere of Industry.
The world of finance is smaller than one might think.
At the end of Industry Season 2, Harper (Myha’la) was ousted from Pierpoint for having faked her college degree, leaving her free falling after a season that saw her destroy any relationship she had to in order to keep climbing the ranks at the investment firm.
In the Season 3 premiere, she quickly finds herself back in the fold — only this time she’s going toe-to-toe with many of her former colleagues.
Having been hired by the “woke” hedge fund FutureDawn, Harper’s goal doesn’t seem to have changed, even if she feels like she’s been a bit sidelined for the time being.
All eyes are on newcomer Henry Muck (played by Kit Harington), who runs a green tech energy company called Lumi in which Pierpoint wants to invest as its set to become a publlicy traded company. Enter FutureDawn, which is also interested in Muck’s company, and we’ve got ourselves a showdown.
Muck is this season’s ultra-wealthy, morally ambiguous character who throws a wedge in the already fraught relationships between Industry‘s main characters, forcing them all to finally gain a modicum of self awareness.
“Season 3 is like, God, this workplace might be the most corruptible influence of my life, and maybe it would be better for me and everyone around me if I wasn’t part of it anymore,” creator Mickey Down teases to Deadline.
He and Konrad Kay, who write the series together, sat down with Deadline to unpack the Season 3 premiere and discuss whether redemption, or a clear conscience, are available to any of these characters when all is said and done.
In the closing minutes of the season 2 finale, Eric fires Harper for having faked a college degree to get into Pierpoint (rather than the far more egregious count of insider trading that he has on her).
DEADLINE: You kind of blew things up at the end of Season 2. How much of Season 3 did you have in your head when you were writing that finale?
MICKEY DOWN: I’d love to say that we knew exactly what we were going to write for Season 3, but it would be a lie. Nothing’s guaranteed. We never know if we’re going to get another season. So we try and write a quite satisfying, or at least interesting, ending for every season. And quite honestly, the first thing we thought about when we were doing Season 3 is how to honor the ending of Season 2. We spoke briefly about the idea of just resetting everything, or figuring about a way for Harper to be back at Pierpoint, and we just felt like it would be a betrayal of the ending, a betrayal of the character, betrayal of the audience. We thought, ‘Okay, the first thing we have to think about is, what does Harper’s life look like outside of Pierpoint?’ There were different versions of that, other versions where she was being slightly more introspective or analytical about where she had gone wrong, other versions where she was more out of business, thinking, ‘Actually, maybe I can have a life that’s approaching stability and where I’m not in finance.’
But Harper is just a shark. She’s someone that’s motivated by self interest. She’s motivated by her own advancement. What does it look like when that person doesn’t have this dopamine hit of the trading floor? What do they do? They act out. They want to get that hit back. She has a sort of addict mentality in that respect. That’s what fueled her relationship with Jesse Bloom [Jay Duplass] in Season 2, and for also trying to get back into the fold in Season 3. So, that was a starting point. Practically, there’s more Yasmin this season, because the beating heart of the show for us, is Yasmin and Harper. And Yasmin was the one that was left on the trading floor. So it was like, ‘What does that look like if Yasmin sits on the trading floor when Harper’s on the other side of the phone, even at this point of a more muted and less powerful position than she was at the end of Season 2? So that was our first starting point for how to actually continue the show with Harper outside the bank.
DEADLINE: How did you settle on the idea that Harper would land at FutureDawn?
KONRAD KAY: Basically, it was the TV logic thing of like, she’s a character who’s been stripped of agency, of power, but part of the joy of watching her is her gaining agency and power. So we wanted to bring her back to a place where she could go toe-to-toe with Eric as quickly as narratively possible, while also making it feel like she’d been out of the game for a while. And she had an existing relationship with Anna from Season 2. We sort of fudged the idea that they were in Berlin in Season 2 and brought them back to London, and had Petra explain that away with a line of dialogue. But we thought for Harper to get power again and for it to feel realistic, she would need a very strong ally who basically was willing to look past the fact she hadn’t graduated, but was also willing to see her as an equal very quickly.
So we thought, philosophically, we could set her up at a fund which was like a beacon of a certain type of investment, a progressive kind of investment, or what the show calls ‘woke investment,’ and to basically put her into into the schism of the two powerhouses within that company. She’s a chameleon, Harper, she sees weaknesses, she seizes on it. As Mickey says, it’s all about her own self advancement. We thought if we could make an organic divorce between two very powerful people, we could get Harper to be part of that divorce, and get her to ally up with one of them, and then it would feel more organic that she got access to that power within three hours on television.
DEADLINE: Tell me about developing the character of Henry Muck. How did you land Kit Harington for that role?
DOWN: I mean, the character Henry really was born out of our desire to write about a certain kind of industry. Season 2, we were like, ‘Let’s write about healthcare. ‘We wrote about healthcare in quite an odd way. We wrote about it only through the lens of Pierpoint’s involvement in healthcare. Rishi makes a joke sort of early on, about the fact that we don’t actually give a f*ck of what this company does. It’s more about how we make money out of it. But one of the things we really wanted to do in this season was just to be more ambitious and how we can expand the universe. We wanted to place Pierpoint firmly within the ecosystem of business and finance and tech and startups. And we thought, ‘Okay, what’s a great industry to explore? One that felt like it had a bit more real life, real economy stakes.’ Green energy.
Then we thought about this whole phenomenon about ESG and the idea of ethical investment, and whether that is a contradiction in terms, and how can we have our Industry approach to that kind of thing. How can we explore, actually, if there is a version of investment management or in banking that can actually be altruistic and for the good of the planet and for good of society? At the center of that had to be a really interesting character, right? So it makes sense for the CEO to be the character that is the new guest to come in, because you’d be able to interact with Pierpoint. You have his own take on the world. We never actually had a character in the show that isn’t buy side or sell side, so a hedge fund manager or someone that sells stocks, or someone on the trading floor. So it felt like a totally different lens for the show — someone in business, someone that actually needs Pierpoint but doesn’t work within Pierpoint. A young person that has a lot of power within the season and a reflection of a certain type of fake-it-til-you-make-it, private education, overeducated bluster that is so prevalent in our country. As far as the highest reaches of government, the highest reaches of business, there are people who have just failed upwards. That’s not to say they’re not intelligent or they’re not hard working. In many respects they are. But there are also people who have just been pushed along by connections and by money and by privilege. Henry was that character — immense privilege, to the point where his uncle owns newspapers and is able to basically bend the narrative of the country to his will. On paper, that character could be a caricature. When you write a logline of that character, it could feel like a little bit of an omniscient, evil, Illuminati figure, but it felt very real to us.
Kit came to us as a fan of the show and said, ‘Is there something for me in the in the season?’ And we were halfway through constructing Henry, and we thought, ‘Okay, well, he could be really, really good, but it’s Kit Harington.’ Actually, I think that really helps, because you come to the character with preconceptions, which are then thrown out when he gives the performance he does. I think the performance is so layered with Kit doing it. The character could have been quite two dimensional. It’s given this level of humanity, empathy. He’s doing pretty awful things, reprehensible things at points, but I think they always come from a place of being, maybe, explainable. You don’t actually, hopefully, empathize with what he’s doing, but I think you can understand why he’s doing it. And, Kit is a really funny actor. He joked with us that after 10 years of Game of Thrones, he wasn’t able to make one joke. And he was like, ‘I’m a funny guy.’ Okay, whatever. We’re gonna write a funny character. But, we didn’t think he’s gonna be that funny. He has a charm which really seduces you to Henry, or makes Henry seductive character, to the point Harper [and] Yasmine falls for it to a certain extent — to the point where there’s a scene Episode 5, which the scales fall from her eyes when she realizes the kind of man that she’s going into bed with, figuratively and literally. Then there’s a vulnerability that Kit brings the character. We write the characters to be nuanced, and we want them to have their vulnerabilities. But Kit brought so much of that to Henry, sort of pinpointing what the character’s mortal wound was, whether it would be his depression or the fact that he lost his father, and what that’s done to his relationship to his own ambition. That stuff, Kit was really interested in exploring, and we explored more because of his involvement. He shows so much of why he’s such a great actor. It’s a privilege to have him in the show.
DEADLINE: For your recurring cast, after two seasons, how has their performance and the embodiment of the character influenced the way that you write them?
KAY: We knew, obviously, what Ken [Leung] was capable of. We’ve seen his career. We underwrote for him in Season 1. We probably underwrote for him a little bit in Season 2. With Marisa [Abela], she was a new talent, and this goes for Myha’la and Harry [Lawtey] as well. We just struck gold with those three actors very quickly. The common denominator across all of them is we can write anything for them and know that they can not only execute, but they’ll execute on a way which is intelligent and almost always like 10% different in every take. If you want it to be the same, it can be the same, but they have such a wealth of intellect and skill that it was great for us. It was very liberating for us as writers, because we were like, ‘Well, we want to take Eric on this crazy, dimensional journey in Season 3, where he’s kind of going through a midlife crisis.’ He’s really horny, he’s drunk at work, but he’s also really ambitious again. There are sad scenes, and there are happy scenes. We just knew that he could do all of it. The same with Marisa. She has unlimited pressure points this season, but she’s also young and a bully and falling in love again. These are really, really quite complex parts, but they were written with the confidence of knowing that we had the actors who could pull them off, if that makes sense.
The other thing was, especially with the younger cast, there’s a huge amount of their own DNA that are now into the characters. They’re not perfect one for one analogs, and they’re not sociopathic, like our characters, but the mapping of character onto actor, that bridge is really close, so it makes everything feel more naturalistic.
DEADLINE: Going off of that, I’m curious if you can say anything about what’s in store for Rob this season. You really come out of the gate swinging with Nicole’s death and, watching that scene, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is the season he finally snaps and just can’t handle this world anymore.
DOWN: Nicole’s death is a catalyst for what is the way that he is the rest of the season, and it starts to make him really think whether he is right for this world. The character is constantly thinking, constantly navigating that. This is the season where all the characters start to think, ‘Actually, am I putting my chips in the right place?’ Season 1 was, I’m entering to this workplace for the first time. I want to make an impression. Season 2 is like, I’m buying into this workplace. I’m getting my feet under the desk, and I’m really selling my store here. Season 3 is like, God, this workplace might be the most corruptible influence of my life, and maybe it would be better for me and everyone around me if I wasn’t part of it anymore. That is a season arc that Rob has. It’s a season where Rob starts to be unafraid to reveal his vulnerability a bit more.
The thing about this show is that it’s about a world where vulnerability is not appreciated, because it’s usually thrown back in your face, or you can’t make money out of it, or it’s seen as a weakness. So people are very scared to be vulnerable in this environment. Rob is a very vulnerable character, and that’s a product of Henry’s performance. Going back to what Konrad said about actors informing the characters, and the way that we write the characters, Rob was conceived as a larger-than-life party boy — takes the drugs, hooks up with loads of women, has this nihilistic young person’s attitude to life. But actually, Harry’s a very vulnerable performer and brought that sort of humanity and doe-eyedness to the character that just wasn’t there on the page. So this season is about really tapping into that and seeing, actually, if he’s able to be vulnerable in a place like this. He comes in, he does probably one of those vulnerable things that someone does in public in the show, which is crying, and a response to it from all his colleagues just turn their backs on it, because that just doesn’t fly in this environment. And then Eric, who is at his core probably a good person as well, takes him to one side, puts his arm on him, says ‘are you okay?’ But then realizes where he is. He’s standing in the middle of Pierpoint. Actually, vulnerability is not something to be praised. So actually, you know what, stopping being such a p*ssy and go back to work. So I think Harry’s arc is probably the one which is going to be veering towards redemption, but maybe not totally there.
DEADLINE: That’s interesting. Do you think any of these characters actually deserve or are capable of earning redemption?
KAY: I mean, I don’t really know what redemption means. I understand it in a TV logic sense. I mean happiness, a kind of freedom. I don’t know. I think we’ve set the bank up to be this place where they go and practice some sort of perverse religion of their own ambition and their pursuit of money. With Robert, we were almost writing it this season as like a prison drama for him. Can he ever actually shake it off? For people like Eric and Harper, they’ve been bought so into it wholesale that I don’t know really what redemption looks like. I don’t want to spoil the season for you, but there is a question that emerges — what does someone like Eric’s life look like without Pierpoint, and is redemption even something that he wants? Because, what does that mean? Does that mean a peaceful life on a porch with kids in a family? I mean, I’m not sure that’s what Eric wants at all. So I guess if by redemption you mean sort of inner peace, I don’t think that’s available to any of them, to be honest.
DEADLINE: That’s a difficult level of honesty to reach about your own characters. As you were speaking, I thought of Yas. She’s done some unspeakable things but also had the same level of trauma happen to her. How do you thread that needle of morality with a character like her?
KAY: I feel like when we write them, a lot of their indefensible decisions, we try and zone in onto what the motivation for that thing might be. And then, though it doesn’t make it excusable by any means, and especially in someone like Charles’s case, who’s maybe the most outright monster we’ve ever created in the show, we at least hope that there is a kind of human understanding. There’s a cause and effect in all of their characters that makes them less cruel.
DOWN: Good answer. Yas especially, we try and explore what the root of her issues is, and why she treats people like commodities sometimes, and why everything seems to be transactional, and the way that she goes through the world, and the way that she uses her own personality, her own femininity, for her advancement. It’s interesting to us why someone would be like that. This season [we explore] the sh*t horror of her personal life. Me and Konrad were randomly watching back in an episode of Season 2 yesterday. There’s this bit when they go to Berlin and she says to Harper, ‘Oh, that was the holiday where I walked into my mom giving head to the guy who we charge the boat from.’ It’s like, there’s so much weird shit going on there. The way that she reacts to that, she throws it away. That’s a traumatic experience for anyone, especially a young girl to be in a position where that’s just a funny anecdote from my past. I think that speaks to a traumatized life.
Season 1 that was a place setting. We were trying to introduce you to the world. Introduce you to these characters. There wasn’t much time to go into their backstories. In season 2, we did that a lot with Harper. In Season 3, we’re doing it with Yasmin. We want to understand why she is like she is, why she’s pursuing the things she pursues. Marisa gives a fantastic performance, and it’s a very vulnerable performance. As I said before, everything they do is despicable, but sometimes it’s explainable. I understand you, and I don’t agree with it, right?
Industry airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
