The actors are perched on red stools at the dark mahogany bar in a 1920s-themed restaurant in Cardiff, Wales. Marisa Abela and Myha’la — who star in HBO’s steamy, propulsive finance drama “Industry” — are filming a key scene for the show’s upcoming season in which their characters, Yasmin Kara-Hanani and Harper Stern, are having an uncharacteristic heart-to-heart. While barely touching the Negronis in front of them (it’s actually watery tea, so it’s understandable), the frenemies are almost competing to reveal their own deep, painful vulnerabilities. At one point, after telling Harper how “fucking jealous” she is of her — and for the first time in five or six takes of this scene — Yasmin starts to cry.
The tears are not in the script, but for creators, writers, showrunners and, now, directors Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, sitting behind monitors about 10 feet away, it’s just the emotional ad-lib they were looking for. Kay vigorously fist-pumps the air while Down, sporting a blue “Industry Writers Room” cap, jabs enthusiastically at the screen. “That’s it — that’s the shot,” he eagerly whispers to Down, his close friend since they met at Oxford University almost 20 years ago. “Cut! Beautiful!”
For all the sex, drugs, widespread debauchery and unintelligible financial jargon that has defined “Industry” since it launched in late 2020, it’s the twisty-turny, sometimes-supportive, sometimes-backstabbing dynamic between damaged British heiress Yasmin and ruthless American overachiever Harper that has become the show’s central axis. The two — who Abela likens to “siblings in how they get away with saying so much to one another” — are the sole survivors from the five fresh-faced would-be traders who arrived at fictitious bank Pierpoint & Co. in Season 1. Their diverging journeys since have effectively reflected the growing ambition and confidence of “Industry” itself.
In the explosive Season 3 finale, which aired in September 2024, Yasmin opted for supposed stability, choosing a privileged life of grouse hunts and tweed jodhpurs on the vast country estate of aristocratic posho and failed entrepreneur Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Harper, meanwhile, agreed to become the Gen Z successor to a shadowy old money head of a bearish investment fund. Their arcs would appear to have been completed, as had Pierpoint’s. Its trading floor — the setting for most of the hostile financial bedlam — was last seen smothered in tarpaulin while awaiting closure after the bank was acquired by an Egyptian sovereign wealth fund. It looked like the perfect series closure for “Industry.”
“I could think of five different reasons why Yasmin and Harper should never speak to each other again — I would never talk to this bitch if it was me in real life!,” says Myha’la.
Courtesy of HBO
“Writing yourself out of a corner is a great creative challenge,” Down says with a smile, speaking earlier in the day over coffee at a Cardiff restaurant. Adds Kay: “But there’s no corner you can’t write yourself out of, especially in our world, because it’s mine and his brainchild.”
For Myha’la, even though the last episode of Season 3 was “written as though it was the end,” she always thought they’d be coming back. “I’m sure the second they finished that finale, they were like, ‘What else can I write?,” she says. “Just for the sheer joy of competing with themselves, and because they love to make art — they love the challenge.”
As brazenly highlighted by Season 4 (which premieres on Jan. 11 in HBO’s vaunted Sunday, 9 p.m., time slot), Down and Kay’s solution to cornering themselves so exquisitely has been to blow everything up and throw the pieces back together again. But this time without the constraints of Pierpoint’s walls.
“In a way, that creative freedom has been amazing,” Kay says. “We were writing about one world, and at the edges of that world were other worlds, like media and politics. With Season 4, we were like, now we don’t have a trading floor, we can actually just go into those spaces.”
From those spaces have emerged new characters (Max Minghella, Kiernan Shipka and Charlie Heaton are among the additions), all very “Industry” in being deeply troubled, unlikable and compelling. There’s a new company at the show’s center in Tender, a fintech startup looking to buy and bully its way into monopolistic dominance. Opportunistic politicians and investigative reporters swing by, as do fascist dynasties and some sinister Jeffrey Epstein undertones. Even the sex and drugs have been turned up a notch, this time with a bleaker, more manipulative edge (but not always: Henry snorting a line off a harpsichord in his manor as a group of kids on a school trip walks by is one of many comedic moments).
Season 4 also throws wholly new genres into the mix, with one particularly dark episode Kay describes as a “neo-Gothic period drama in a big house.”
In a show all about risk-taking and its (mostly destructive) consequences, both admit that making such a detour from its origins is itself a high-stakes gamble.
“But I honestly think there’s no point in doing anything if you’re not going to take a risk,” says Down. “I’m sure some people will be like, ‘What the fuck are they doing? It’s supposed to be set in a bank!’ But this show is whatever the fuck we want it to be.”
“Industry” was always destined to be the “little engine that could,” says Jane Tranter, an executive producer and co-founder of Bad Wolf, the production company and physical studio in South Wales where the show has mostly shot (as have, among other things, “His Dark Materials” and “Doctor Who”). A former senior BBC exec, Tranter was already thinking about a drama set in the world of finance when, in late 2015, just after she returned to the U.K. from a stint in L.A., HBO’s Casey Bloys, now the company’s CEO, approached her about doing a series.
“I was absolutely fascinated as to why, after the crash of 2008, when the banks and everything they’d been doing were exposed, young people — who were meant to be the generation thinking differently about the world — were still going in their droves to work in the city,” she says. Struck by the real-life tragedy of an intern who died of exhaustion (a story that wound up being in the very first episode), Tranter realized the way in would be these entry-level recruits. As it happened, a colleague had just met budding scribes Down and Kay about a different project, and they’d mentioned they’d both previously worked in banks. Tranter persuaded them to start writing. But there was one minor hitch: They’d never written for a network.
“HBO originally promoted this as ‘Two ex-bankers have written a show about finance and it’s going to blow the lid off the industry,’ not knowing that we’d spent our time sat behind desks with no power for a year,” says Konrad Kay (left).
The first script they based on their own miserable experiences on banking’s lowest rungs. It was, as Kay freely says now, “really dour” and “glacially slow,” prompting Bloys to ask whether they’d actually “had any fun when you were in this job?” They started again, this time trying to bottle some of the “anticipatory energy” they had going into the workplace for the first time. There was still a lengthy process of endless rewrites — that first episode would go through roughly 60 iterations — and what Down describes as “three years of development hell.” As it happens, “Industry” getting the eventual green light was one of the final acts of HBO boss Richard Plepler before he exited in February 2019.
With the BBC on board as a co-producer, the first season started shooting that summer, boasting a lead cast of first-timers practically as new to TV as the show’s creators.
Alongside Abela and the now mononymic Myha’la were Harry Lawtey, David Jonsson and Nabhaan Rizwan (all now names very much in the ascendancy — and in the case of Jonsson, a BAFTA rising star winner). The only recognizable actor was “Lost” alumni Ken Leung, playing the fiery baseball bat-swinging Pierpoint vet Eric Tao. Lena Dunham directed the pilot episode and warned Leung that he’d probably have to play mentor. “She was like, they’re just out of drama school — they might be looking at you in a certain way, so be prepared,” Leung says. They didn’t need any help. “They are incredible actors, as you can see from the get-go.”
But Season 1 was not a hit. Despite solid reviews praising its fast pace style and the performances and numerous column inches dedicated to the raucous levels of nihilistic behavior on display (“Millennium Mad Men,” claimed one headline), ratings were fractional. While the show developed a passionate, if tiny, audience, “we had to really push to get a second season and had to really push again to get a third,” says Tranter. (She also notes that, at around $2 million an episode, “Industry” was cheap to make, at least by HBO standards.)
It was Season 3, the one that wrapped the story up in a bow (almost), that would become “Industry”’s breakout. Sensing it might be their last, Down and Kay went for it. “We said to each other, let’s just swing as hard as we can for the fences and if it blows up, who cares?” recalls Kay. But audiences and critics alike loved the swing (which included, amid a kaleidoscope of depraved mayhem, disastrous IPOs, a brawl in a kids’ soft play area, abusive billionaire parents and two sudden deaths — one shockingly violent).
One of the show’s side characters, the foulmouthed and near-comically amoral Pierpoint VP Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), was even given his own episode, a high-intensity coke-addled descent into chaos as he tries to recoup spiraling gambling debts. The Safdie brothers — and Down and Kay’s love for “Uncut Gems” — can take credit for inspiring that one.
Thankfully, with HBO having promoted “Industry” from a Monday slot to Sunday, more people watched Season 3 than ever. The premiere debuted with a live audience of 300,000 and would surpass 1.6 million with delayed viewing. Season 4 was by far the quickest green light in the show’s history. HBO’s VP of drama programming, Cela Sutton, says the network realized it now “had a hit on our hands” and knew the drill. “We were excited to renew it as quickly as possible.”
“I love the way they get away with those names,” says Kit Harington, who joined “Industry” in Season 3 as spoiled aristocrat and entrepreneur Henry Muck alongside fellow show newcomer Miriam Petche, playing Pierpoint intern Sweetpea Golightly. Both have much bigger roles in Season 4.
While the scope of “Industry” has grown with each renewal, the confidence of the team putting it together has evolved with it. Down and Kay, showrunners since the start, marked their directorial debuts with the final two episodes of Season 3, but have helmed four of eight episodes in Season 4 (including the one they admit is the “most out there”).
When cinematographer Federico Cesca joined “Industry” in Season 2, he was almost entirely shooting on shoulders, the camera effectively behaving as it was were a character in itself. “It was unpredictable and with plenty of agency to look away from people and find something else,” he says. But alongside Down and Kay, the Europe-based Argentine has broadened the show’s cinematic language, often with inspiration from their favorite directors and films. In Season 3, there’s a flashback sequence during an ayahuasca trip that Cesca describes as “almost Kubrickian,” and another (perhaps actually Kubrickian) scene he bills as “‘Barry Lyndon’ meets ‘A Clockwork Orange.’” In Season 4, he says there are notes of “Magnolia” and “The Brutalist,” plus — in keeping with the financial-thriller themes — “Michael Clayton” and “Margin Call.”
Casting, too, has graduated. Landing “Game of Thrones” star Harington for Season 3 was a serious statement of intent — the show’s first major signing. But it was helped by the fact that he was already a fan. “Mickey and Konrad are quite disparaging about their first season, but I don’t feel that at all,” says the actor. “For me, it stood out as a piece of TV that was unlike any any other and they’d written characters that were fully realized and rich.”
Another Season 3 arrival was newcomer Miriam Petche, playing Pierpoint intern Sweetpea Golightly, a name she admits thinking was “insane” at first — “I thought it was a ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s” reference” — but is now its “fiercest defender.”
But the “Industry” additions last time around are nothing compared to the latest offering. Alongside Minghella (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), Shipka (“Mad Men”) and Heaton (“Stranger Things”), “Ted Lasso” breakout Toheeb Jimoh joins the ensemble in a sizable role, while Kal Penn appears early on.
Casting director Julie Harkin had worked with Minghella on his 2018 directorial debut, “Teen Spirit,” and says she “chuckled to myself” when she read the role of Whitney Halberstram, the self-assured co-founder of Tender and a man whose snake-oil-salesman qualities — and some considerably shadier elements — slowly rise to the surface. “Max is playful and subtle and has all the dexterity to go to the different places Whitney needs to go — and he’s kind of fearless as well,” she says. Unlike Harington, Minghella hadn’t watch much “Industry” when he signed up, but says it was “massively, massively popular” in his social circle — “my friends are sort of religious about the show, which was terrifying to me.”
For the character Haley Clay, a doting assistant with more than a provocative edge (and a backstory that emerges later in the season), Harkin says she turned to Shipka because there was “something so incredibly interesting in bringing her a role that goes completely against what audiences have seen her in.” Indeed, anyone who last watched her play Don Draper’s little daughter may well be shocked by where “Industry” takes her (the most recent trailer gives much away).
Thanks to the show’s growing status, Harkin says they not only landed all the top casting choices, but she’s now fielding regular pitches from agents eager to get their clients on board.
“You get the U.K. agents ringing you all day, and then as soon as teatime hits, it’s the U.S. It’s hard to keep up with it,” she says. “But yeah, we’ve had a lot of incoming for the show.”
“Whitney is an enigma to everybody, including myself,” says Max Minghella of fintech startup CEO and Season 4 addition Whitney Halberstram. “We continue to figure him out, even after we finished shooting, and figure out where the truth lies, what’s authentic and what’s manipulation. I feel like the lines are so blurred with this character — so much of his desire is tied to some kind of business or strategic warfare.”
Even the music — credited by many to be a core element of the “Industry” DNA — has benefited from the rising popularity. Music supervisor Oliver White, a friend of Down and Kay’s for years, says that in Season 4 they’ve been able to license tracks from top artists that were previously unavailable. “A lot of them have seen the show and have been fans,” he says. Among them is Daft Punk, whose baroque-inspired disco track “Veridis Quo” plays over a nightclub scene with Harper and Yasmin. (White also recalls how the Donna Summer estate was so enthused by how the show deployed “State of Independence” in a Season 2 episode that they sent a note saying it was “one of the best uses they’d seen for the song.”)
But licensed tracks play second fiddle to the “Industry” score, which is littered with the show’s now near-iconic euphoric and floaty electro, composed by the Berlin-based Canadian Nathan Micay (hired largely because so many of his tracks found their way onto an early Spotify playlist White put together with Down and Kay). Micay’s ability to, as White says, “make the trading floor sound like a dance floor,” meant there were few notes from the showrunners at first, but now he says they’re coming through with suggestions.
“On the last season, the common note I’d get would be ‘Make this sick,’ and on Season 4 it’s been ‘Make me touch God,’” he says. And how does one touch God with the score? “With them at this point I know it just means: Channel the movie ‘Heat.’ Just channel all of ‘Heat’ into a 30-second TV cue.”
With a three-year exclusive TV deal Down and Kay signed with HBO only 12 months old, it feels like a safe investment — even in the volatile entertainment market — to bet on them coming back for “Industry” Season 5. Kay admits they have an “ending in sight,” and are “starting to write towards the bull’s-eye.”
But where in the upper echelons of wealth and power they take their hedonistic adventure to reach this conclusion is anyone’s guess — even theirs.
“We don’t know what the fuck is going to happen. We’re constantly making it up as we go along,” says Down. “We never had a big thesis statement about the world or capitalism; we just write what we think is interesting at the time. And that sometimes manifests in weird fucking things.”
