[Editor’s Note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Industry” Season 4, Episode 8, “Both, And.”]
“Industry” creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down entered Season 4 wanting to shoehorn their favorite conspiracy-thriller films into their series set in London’s financial world. But as Kay told IndieWire on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, it became impossible to write a contemporaneous story about money and politics, “that didn’t have some version of the ascendant face of autocracy and right-wing politics.”
As the creators detailed in the following excerpt from the podcast, Marisa Abela’s character Yasmin became the key to incorporating this storyline. It’s a Season 4 story arc that ends in shocking fashion, with Yasmin hosting a Paris fundraiser for the dangerous right-wing white nationalist Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft). It’s a private hotel gathering featuring known royal Nazi supporters and young escorts, who Whitney (Max Minghella) had previously used to gather Kompromat (Russian for “compromising material”), including 14-year-old Dolly (Skye Lucia Degruttola), who was employed to ensnare Eric Tao (Ken Leung) earlier in the season.
It’s a season finale that aired when public awareness of the Epstein files dominated headlines, leading to the downfall of princes and CEOs across the globe, but, as Down and Kay discussed, the tracks for Yasmin to become a Ghislaine Maxwell-like figure had already been laid in previous seasons.
The following excerpt from Kay and Down’s Toolkit podcast interview has been edited for clarity.
Konrad Kay: “Between seasons, me and Mickey talked about not ending the show, because that’s premature, but just thinking of what is the greatest odyssey we can send the characters on? If you took a frame of them the first time you see them and put it next to the frame of where you lead them in Season 4: What’s the greatest and most disparate journey, but also that felt true to the characters that didn’t feel like a betrayal of them?
And with Yasmin, as beautifully played by Marisa in the first season, she was afraid of her own shadow, constantly softly stepping around, fucking up the lunch order, a bit of a wallflower, and where we leave her in Season 4, we just thought it was radical storytelling. It was a journey that we knew Marisa had the chops to play, and we thought that it was earned in the sense of her relationship to her own trauma.
Edward Holcroft as Sebastian Stefanowicz in ‘Industry’
But also, because the show is contemporaneous, we pull stuff from what we’re feeling about the world, and as we were writing about the fraud element of it, there was the political element of it. It was very hard to write a season about money and politics, when we were writing it, that didn’t have some version of the ascendant face of autocracy and right-wing politics. It’s impossible to ignore on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s come to fruition horribly in the U.S., and it’s the rising force in the U.K.
So, who was it from our universe that would be most susceptible to that kind of messaging, or who would find the seductions of the power offered by that the most compelling? And Yasmin felt like the site of all of that stuff for us. It felt very organic to us.
So then we were thinking, in good writing ways, we tend to try hiding the football, and make it when you end up with her in Epside 8 — and it is quite a shocking scene, and it is alarming, and I’m sure it’ll divide audiences –– that I think if you go back and rewatch the season, I think all of the track is laid quite subtly for that stuff.
Mickey Down: At the end of Season 3, her whole character arc is an exercise in justification for what’s happened to her. At the end of Season 3, she’s presented with the root of her trauma by the Alondra (Angela Sant’Albano), who says, “Look, your father was a despicable human being with these despicable things [parties with underage girls who were presumedly raped by lecherous older men], and I’m showing you him now.” And she rejects that. She just says, “Send her away [Yasmin fires Alondra]. I don’t want to engage with that. I don’t want deal with that.” And then in Season 4, she’s beginning to justify that [same] kind of behavior. And there are obviously illusions to real-life characters in her.
[Editor’s Note: The connections between Yasmin’s character and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell are myriad, most blatantly with her father, publishing mogul Charles (Adam Levy), who, like Ghislaine’s media mogul father Robert Maxwell, dies mysteriously on his yacht in Season 3. Here, Down is referencing the Season 4 shocking finale, where Yasmin has followed Ghislaine’s dark path to using young, and some underage, women to ensare wealthy white nationalist patrons.]
Marisa Abela and Adam Levy in ‘Industry’ Season 3Nick Strasburg
It’s not a show of villains and heroes. It’s a show of people who are ambitious and sometimes make decisions that are more really questionable. But I think that they all feel that they’re justified in their actions, and that is just to a “T” with Yasmin. I think Yasmin can look at all the things she does in Season 4 and think I’m doing that for my own benefit, my own joy. There is a means to an end here; there is a reasoning for all of this. And as we push the character to sort of the point of no return, we really wanted to test how much an audience can go along with that.
Marisa gives such a soulful performance, and I think it’s a very empathetic performance, but she’s doing some pretty horrific things by the end. But she would not be able to play the character if she was thinking she was doing horrific things. She has to constantly think this is justified. That’s how people who have experienced trauma go through the world sometimes, and I think, as Konrad said, the track was really laid in Seasons 1 and 2.
Kay: Also, that’s the interesting side of it. It’s not [that] all fascists are psychopaths. They’re opportunistic. There’s an expediency. And also the interesting thing about that side of the aisle is: How do you constantly have a dialogue with yourself where you rationalize that you are the right side of the conversation? That’s what we’re interested in with her.
Kiernan Shipka as Haley in ‘Industry’
[Editor’s Note: Later in the conversation, Kay and Down discussed the introduction of Haley (Kiernan Shipka) in Season 4. For the first six episodes, we are led to believe Haley is the executive assistant of CEO Whitney (Max Minghella), but in Episode 6, she admits to Yasmin she was an escort Whitney hired to gather Kompromat on those he needed to perpetrate his fraud.]
Down: The evolution of Haley’s character was practical as well as creative, honestly, because we needed to get Marisa to a moment where Yasmin was able to actually put this stuff [hiring young escorts to ensnare powerful men for her own gain] into action. She ends up in a hotel room in Paris surrounded by people who are going do things on her behalf. We have to have someone to teach her. And obviously all that stuff happens somewhat offscreen [there is a months-long time jump in Episode 8, after the fall of Tender and Yasmin’s marriage, and before her Paris hotel fundraiser for Stefanowicz]. It would’ve been a bit of a jump if she’d gotten to that role without any kind of guidance or someone who was from that world.
Kay: Also, I’m not saying they’re analogists in any way, but the commodification of sex and the female body is a bit of a theme in the show, obviously, especially in this season. There’s the sweeping angle of [Yasmin’s] complicity in her own exploitation, [with] the line of that being gossamer-thin with the idea of Haley being an escort, who’s chosen that life for herself. As Mickey said, it would’ve been too big a character jump for Yasmin to arrive at this idea of sort of power through the influence of sex around a certain type of man. We thought that had to be almost incepted into her through a woman who chose to do it herself.
Down: It has lived inside [Yasmin] since Season 2, because obviously she puts her hand on the Italian businessman’s hand, and she understands that there is some power there. After that, she’s always had that power…. Her relationship with her father is that power. But you needed someone to be like, “No, it can also be transactional in a monetary way. You can actually use this to your benefit. You can actually use this to ensnare people. You can use Kompromat,” but practically, it needed to feel organic. You couldn’t just jump to Paris with her running a sort of sex ring and being a madam.
Kay: I do think as writers or dramatists, whatever the word is, I do think — and I know it’s the episode title — but we really do take like the “Both, And” approach to the situations that we dramatize. We try and present the other side of it. We try not to thrust our own morality onto the thing. If we’re presenting a point, we often want to try and present its counterpoint in the same scene.
To hear Kay and Down’s full interview subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
