‘Industry’ Co-Creators on Show’s New Villain: “If You Show Too Much of the Monster, It Feels Less Scary”
SOURCE:Hollywood Reporter|BY:Seija Rankin
Mickey Down and Konrad Kay discuss the big reset for the hit HBO series, new cast additions and keeping their heads down amid a potentially looming corporate merger.
[This story contains spoilers from the season four premiere of Industry.]
“We are really going to regret that fucking Michael Clayton quote,” laughs Konrad Kay. Back in 2025, Kay and his Industry co-creator Mickey Down invited The New Yorker onto the set of their hit HBO series. They happened to name the George Clooney-starring legal thriller as one of their major inspirations for season four and the throwaway mention became one of those statements that has followed them all the way to this Sunday’s premiere. “People are going to compare this season to the movie, which is never what you want to happen,” adds Kay.
At the end of season three, Konray and Down blew up the show’s central conceit. Pierpoint & Co. was sold off for parts, the trading floor was shut down and the series regulars scattered in different directions: Harper Stern (MyHa’la) and Eric Tao (Ken Leung) launched their own fund; Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) married herself off to British royalty; and Harry Lawtey’s Rob left the show entirely. “It felt very freeing to get rid of the main conceit and be able to think about all of the stuff like politics, media, finance — let’s call it a corporate bucket of slop — instead,” says Kay in the chat with The Hollywood Reporter below. “We were thinking about corporate thrillers and films we admire, like Michael Mann‘s work, that use proper grown-up storytelling.”
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You add a few new characters to this season, and I think that Max Minghella‘s Whitney Halberstam is the most intriguing out of the first episode. Do you see him as replacing previous characters who have served as a foil for Harper?
MICKEY DOWN I think he’s a character who could only exist in the recalibration of the show — he wouldn’t fit within the Pierpoint ecosystem. He’s somewhat of an abstraction by design, and it feels like you can’t quite place him. When we first hired Max and talked to him about the show, we wanted him to feel like he could do something he’d never done before. Max himself, as a performer, is also quite hard to place. Obviously, people know his father, but his accent and look and heritage all feel enigmatic. He told us he found the character by mimicry, and he was drawing on all these people in his own life as well as people he’s seen on TV. We had conversations about how much of his backstory to show, and we originally had scenes of his home life and his parents, but it felt like it was pulling focus from what this guy wants and what his belief system is . As in every good horror film, if you show too much of the monster it feels less scary. It’s way more interesting to drip feed the monster and his motivations.
One element of backstory we do get is the fact that he grew up poor; given how Industry plays with class politics in the U.K., I imagine that was extremely intentional.
DOWN He talks to Jonah [Kal Penn] in the first episode about how in America, your story starts whenever you begin telling it. That’s anathema to how the U.K. works, which is that your story begins the day you were born, in the place you were born, with the people you were born to, and it’s quite difficult to break away from that. Even people who were born into lower socioeconomic backgrounds who make a lot of money are constantly reminded of the fact that they’re working class. Whitney pushes up against the rigid class hierarchy. He’s also constantly holding back his true opinions about some of the people he interacts with, like Henry [Kit Harrington], who was born into every kind of entitlement and is allowed to fail continuously. In episode two, Henry is going through his CV with Whitney and is like, “I was a cabinet minister, I ran a public utility, yet you’re still offering me this job.”
How does Tender, the company that was introduced this season, fit into that idea?
DOWN Whitney’s identity is a soluble as Tender’s, and the company is a metaphor for his psyche. It’s on a knife edge of being a resounding success or an epic failure, which I think is true of most companies — maybe not with the outright criminal element. Also, it’s worth noting that everyone apart from Harper is incentivized to see Tender succeed. Analysts want the stock to go up because their people and institutions are invested in it. The government wants to be seen as an incubator for FinTech companies like this. People are completely blind to things that are clearly fraudulent. You’re not a criminal if you succeed; you’re an entrepreneur. If a company outgrows its original sin and becomes a success, people forget about the original sin.
How have you found the Hollywood class system as compared to the British class system?
DOWN I don’t think we would have been given this opportunity in England. We basically had to go to America to do it. Jane Tranter, who is a producer of the show through BBC, it was her relationship with HBO that got the show up and running. Me and Konrad had been writing for a number of years and we got nowhere because we weren’t named writers. That’s not a class thing, it’s more that people don’t want to take a risk on people who’ve never done it before. But at HBO the sense was, that doesn’t matter, they’ve written something interesting and cool and they could do it with our patronage.
Since you do have this partnership with the BBC, do you feel more protected or insulated from any potential acquisition of Warner Brothers and HBO?
KAY To be honest, we are not really across any of those merger conversations so we don’t really feel comfortable commenting on it, if that’s alright.
You’ve talked about having to convince HBO that it was a good idea to raise the stakes last season in regards to the murder of Rishi’s wife; have you now raised the stakes permanently? Or is part of this season’s reset also a reset on potential violence?
DOWN What we said at the time was that we had to show consequences in the world of the show. That storyline allowed us to do it in an operatic way. It opened the door to violence that was less implied. I’m not saying we murder loads of people this season, but the idea of a threat is more tangible now.
Which relationship on the show, be it romantic or platonic or some combination of the two, do you guys feel is the strongest or most well-adjusted?
KAY That’s hard, actually. Maybe Kwabena [Toheeb Jimoh] and Harper in a weird way. He feels like a good antidote to the rest of the characters, because he’s the only one who wants a functioning personal life and he doesn’t see that as a weakness. His interactions feel less pathological.
What was the hardest thing to pull off this season?
KAY Just the schedule itself was very grueling. We had to light and shoot sometimes eight or nine pages a day, which is crazy for a TV show. In episode two, when we shoot in these stately homes, you’ve always got someone watching you, telling you not to step on something. (Laughs.) We also shot in little private jets, which are just impossible to move a camera around in. But it was also a thrill to get away from the trading floor. Me and Mick are still relatively green directors, we only directed the last two episodes of season three. This season is kind of all on location. This production has an indie sensibility so we’re also doing multiple locations in a day. When we shot in London, there was a guerilla feeling. There were loads of real people, not background actors. That first scene of Kal and Max coming into their office on Canary Wharf, a lot of the people you see are not actors, they’re just people who were there. We wanted a lot of those moments not to feel like a film set.
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Industry premiered season four Sunday night on HBO and is now streaming on HBO Max.
