“I can do it. I can look hot enough in three months!”
Photo: Simon Ridgway/HBO
Spoilers follow for “PayPal of Bukkake,” the season-four premiere of Industry which aired on January 11.
As Jay Jonah Atterbury, one of a handful of new characters on the fourth season of Industry, Kal Penn weaponizes and corrupts the stoner quirks viewers may recognize from his years playing Kumar Patel in the Harold & Kumar films. His easygoing roguishness? Not so fun when paired with casual racism. Self-deprecation as a defense mechanism? It’s more bitter than charming now. Penn convincingly makes Jonah, co-creator of the fintech company Tender, an asshole puffed up on his own wealth and status. But the betrayal he experiences at the hands of best friend and business partner Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) at the end of Industry’s season-four premiere also makes him an unlikely tragic figure and the first of many bodies that will likely tap out of the rat race over the course of the season.
Whitney and Jonah are two of the series’s most important new characters, co-leaders of a payment-processing company threatened by a British law aiming to curtail online porn. They’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Tender’s partnerships with adult-entertainment websites, but Whitney and Jonah see the future of the company differently. Jonah thinks Tender should stay loyal to the sex workers and be content with their already significant market share, while Whitney wants to throw them aside to move into more traditional financial spaces and grow even further. It’s an existential dilemma the pair argue about in all of Minghella and Penn’s scenes together, and it comes to an end when Whitney calls Jonah into the office for a surprise meeting that turns out to be a coup. By the end of “PayPal of Bukkake,” Whitney is firmly in control of the company and Jonah’s out on the street, a betrayal Penn makes us feel with his emotional defeat in the board room. “Jonah is so comfortable in front of Whitney because the trust is implicit,” says Penn. “Which is what makes the hurt that much deeper when Whitney orchestrates the board to fire me.”
In the years since 2004’s Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Penn’s carved out a niche embodying big-talking, attention-grabbing rascals who say inappropriate things, then shrug their way through the consequences. Outside broad comedy, Penn’s performances in Mira Nair’s critically acclaimed family drama The Namesake, prime-time procedurals House and Clarice, and his own short-lived sitcom Sunnyside tap into wells of fragility and thoughtfulness that now make Jonah the Fredo to Whitney’s Michael Corleone, despite his dickish loudmouthedness. “They put you to work — it’s fast, it’s wordy, it’s layered, the things you’re saying may not be the things you mean,” Penn said of joining Industry’s fourth season. “Outside of Sunnyside, it was probably my favorite thing I’ve worked on in a decade.”
Tell me how you got cast as Jonah.
I was a fan. Mickey and Konrad had been fans since Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and I don’t know how it came about between them and our amazing casting director, but by the time I got the phone call, those were conversations my team had had with them. I was like, “What’s the role? Is this where they tell me I have to take all my clothes off for four episodes and I have to decide whether I want to do that? Do I have enough time to go to the gym?” I did not have to take my clothes off. [Laughs.] And then you’re like, “Why not? I can do it. I can look hot enough in three months!”
How was Jonah described to you?
Jonah Atterbury is the co-founder of this firm, and he’s got a completely different vision of where the company should go compared to Whitney. He’s not the best behaved. A lot of people who are that level of arrogant, there’s also an immense insecurity, right? He drinks his problems away. He’s still stuck in that early-2000s mentality of, I crushed it and made $100 million selling a company. I can behave as badly as I want. It’s depicted fairly accurately, from what I understand, of a lot of guys in these jobs. One of the things people have always told me is, “You’re too nice.” There are jobs that I’ve taken in the past where I really love the character because he’s the antithesis of “too nice,” and I think Jonah is one of those guys. There is no reality in which you think he’s too nice.
Jonah and Whitney are introduced via a wide-shot walk and talk where you discuss masturbation, the Christian right, Tender’s mission statement. It’s very dense but immediately sets up your characters’ different personalities and approach to the company. Tell me about filming that.
I loved shooting that. We were in Canary Wharf in London. The camera’s a block and a half away across the street, and we’re walking upstairs, and at the bottom of those stairs are actual normal people going about their business. There were a couple starts-and-stops because they would yell “Rolling!” and somebody wanted a picture with me or Max. But shooting in the real place, I don’t know any actor that doesn’t prefer that. You’re dropped into the center of reality. You can’t even see the camera. Any subconscious desire to mug is not in your brain. I felt like we were living the scene in the moment.
Did you do any other prep for the scene?
I’m not a smoker, but Jonah smokes and vapes. When I was walking around Canary Wharf for a few days before we started shooting, I watched bankers smoke. I don’t mean it to sound so creepy. [Laughs.] When I shot The Namesake for Mira Nair, the film is missing all the college years, but in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, the intimate details of the character Gogol are spelled out, like which dorm room he lost his virginity in at Yale. I found what would have been that dorm room based on the description and knocked on the door, forgetting that I might be a recognizable actor to some college students. I was like, “Hi, I’m doing some research on a film, and I was wondering if I could just look around ’cause I lost my virginity in this room?” And they’re like, “What?” So now I’m always mindful of that. You hover around Canary Wharf, you observe, you try to take it in. Why are you scarfing down a cigarette so fast? Do you have to get back into a meeting? Are you just trying to get that nicotine hit? I’m watching and pretending I’m on the phone.
When Jonah is watching the new Tender ad, his first comment after is, “A lot of Asians in that.” Tell me about that lin, and how you wanted it to come across.
That was written by Mickey and Konrad. I told them this when I read the first draft: I interned in college at a production company run by this trust-fund kid. I learned how not to produce movies by working for this guy. He was brash, misogynistic. I had to pull headshots for actors for a project he was casting. I show him Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s headshot, and he goes, “Is this kid fucking Asian? I’m not trying to fucking hire Asians in my movies, Kal. Bring me some good white American kids.” I was channeling that guy because I wanted the reactions from the guys around me to be what I felt when I was in that situation. He wasn’t trying to be racist. He just was racist. Jonah has a fair amount of misogyny, racism, and very late-’90s-esque false bravado that exists in him.
It’s funny because I read the scene almost in the opposite way: that Jonah is clocking some weird, implicit racism from the marketing team in trying to sell this app by having a lot of Asian people in the ad. My interpretation was perhaps more generous to Jonah.
There’s no right answer. The reason I feel like Jonah’s racism is part of what drove that is the scene later, where I talk about the kind of porn that I watch. Jonah has a bit of racial obsession.
Your final scene in this episode is your firing. Whitney brings you into the office, and you realize it’s an ambush. You’re at one end of the table, Whitney is at the other, and there’s this agonizing sequence where you try to get him to acknowledge you. Tell me about filming that.
The shots are fairly long. The coverage isn’t traditional. This is written in the scene, but Max didn’t really look at me until the very end. There’s the idea that you’re always listening to your scene partners, even if it’s not verbal, and with his performance, he really drew out a lot of the emotional arc Jonah goes through. I love that scene because I’m hung-over and I’m obviously cocky and arrogant. My first thought is something’s gone wrong at the company that requires my attention. I see the full board and the legal team, and the first thing in my head is probably like, Some intern died on the third floor. But it’s very quickly evident that it’s about me, and it’s painful. To Jonah, it’s far less about the business that we built and almost exclusively about the relationship between two friends. It’s a backstabbing scene. It’s Whitney completely throwing a dagger and eviscerating every organ that Jonah has ever had and holding his heart up and making him watch it while it beats for the last time. That’s the betrayal I felt. I’m bawling my eyes out in one take! And I loved it. I loved the way that it was shot because from Jonah’s perspective, it captured the isolation and loneliness. And you also really get a sense of Max’s manipulation but also an undercurrent of guilt — but not enough to not make him throw me under the bus.
Some of the specific issues with Jonah in this firing scene are his odor and his hygiene. Do you know the reasoning there?
That was in there from the first draft. The character is an amalgam with a bunch of different touchpoints, and one was Sam Bankman-Fried. There are pictures of him looking disheveled, even if he’s in a $2,000 hoodie. Some of the idea was you’re a business creator who’s done something nobody’s done before; maybe you’re not showering because you’re sleeping in the office. And then during the wardrobe fitting, we all agreed that maybe it was a little less on the nose if Jonah dresses better. The way Industry sources watches and all of this high-end stuff — there’s a watch handler, and they give me the watch, and I give the watch back at the end of the shoot because the watch is more than my salary.
Harper says in this episode, “Without an economic function, society buries you before you’re dead.” This made me wonder, What is going to happen to Jonah? Did you think about his purpose after this?
That’s exactly how you outline your character: Where is he going? He wasn’t cut off from his ownership stake, so there’s endless money, but I think Jonah will, whether you see any of this or not, pursue litigation. It’s sort of like a breakup. I imagine Jonah’s hurt for quite a long time. We already know he has a drinking problem. We already know he escapes with women, by flaunting his power and his money. We also know he’s insecure. He’s probably done his fair share of coke. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a drug spiral, but I would expect that there’s some sort of a spiral he goes down before he pulls himself out of it.
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