SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 4 finale of HBO‘s Industry.
Mickey Down and Konrad Kay find themselves in an interesting moment, having taken one of the biggest swings yet with their HBO financial drama Industry when more eyes are on the once-modest financial drama than ever.
Somewhat frustratingly, the conversation around the series as reached its fever pitch right when the Season 4 finale delivered a shocking, if entirely logical, turn for one of its central characters that drew some obvious parallels to one of the biggest news stories this century, which also just so happens to be dominating the news cycle again: the Epstein files.
Put simply, surely, the writing partners were inspired by Ghislaine Maxwell’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein when designing publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani’s (Marisa Abela) latest venture hosting salons for de fact neo-Nazis from businessmen to politicians where she and her new assistant Haley (Kiernan Shipka), plucked from the sinking ship that was Tender, seduce these men with underage women and film their sex acts for blackmail. And while they admit that some of Maxwell’s backstory did serve as inspiration for Yasmin, they also think explaining the show’s latest direction as a “ripped from the headlines” move is a little reductive — not to mention, it would’ve been entirely too on the nose.
From their perspective, they’ve been setting the stage for this “heel turn,” as Down coined it, since they conceived the show a decade ago.
“For me and Mickey, it was like, ‘Let’s not be salacious. Let’s be true.’ That was a genuine instinct that we were both pursuing. Also, it’s kind of dramatically compelling to make the boldest choices, especially on long-form TV,” Kay explained. “That moment in Paris doesn’t work if you haven’t spent like 30 hours with Marisa’s character…We just felt that it was the right place to take it.”
The Yasmin bit might be dominating the headlines for the finale, but it is far from the only eye-popping revelation in the episode, which saw Tender finally collapse under the weight of Whitney Halberstram’s (Max Minghella) web of lies.
Once again, Down and Kay have left viewers quite intrigued by where they’re taking this story for its fifth and final season. In the interview below, they remain coy about what’s to come but set the record straight about how they’ve arrived at this moment.
DEADLINE: First of all, congrats on the renewal. How are you feeling about putting Season 4 to bed and moving fully on to the final one?
MICKEY DOWN: We were just joking…I’m really excited about going off the internet. I’m incredibly online during the time when the show is airing, because I’m a sucker for the reaction, to be honest, and it’s all good again. I’m really happy. There’s so much of it now that you actually can’t read all of it, literally, which is great, because there’s so much reaction, which is great, but yeah, I’m looking forward to not having to think about Season 4 ever again. This is the last thing we’re doing on it. Then we can do the thing we always do, which is completely forget about it.
DEADLINE: So, now that we’ve seen all of Season 4, can you give me more insight into how you developed where the show was going past Season 3? And how do you bring elements of that philosophy to the final season?
KONRAD KAY: Well, after [Season] 3, we had a bit of open road. So we chose to make a thriller, in the vein of a lot of movies that we kind of felt didn’t get made anymore or at least get made a little bit [less] frequently. So there were bits of conspiracy thriller and bits of corporate thriller and bits of erotic thriller. Me and Mickey were just doffing our cap to all of our influences and trying to make the most compelling show we could while also telling really good — I mean, I’m especially proud of the Harper/Yasmin/Henry arcs this season, because I think they feel like a continuation of what we’ve known since Season 1 with the two women, but they feel like nice sort of inversions. Well, maybe Yas is less of an inversion, but Harper feels like slightly more of an inversion.
Season 5 is just great, because we know what the end is. We know the final images of all the characters. We had a 12-week room over the course of the new year, just now. So we know what we’re writing towards. It’s been very fun to just think about what the final eight hours are going to say about these characters. Me and Mick, we’re obviously very diagnostic about our own work and like, not to immediately, sort of, as Mickey says, course correct Season 4, but we’re kind of quite excited about maybe stepping our foot back off the plot mechanics a little bit and going for something that’s just a little bit more character-focused and a little bit more interior, especially because trying to really be underneath the hood of the characters for the final eight hours, I think, is basically going to be our mantra.
[Season] 4 felt like a natural growth and a progression of ambition. Season 5 is going to be just as ambitious and, hopefully, just as engaging, but I think it’s going to be led, really, by the characters, because we know that we’re going to ride towards an ending. If we were going to do a sixth season or a seventh, I think we’d probably keep that maximalism going. We said in the statement when we were hanging our boots up that we need to know when to leave the party, and I think that is pretty important. You don’t want to overplay your hand. You don’t overstay your welcome, but also you don’t run the risk of repeating yourself in a way that doesn’t feel true to the thematic rounding of the show. By its very nature, there’s always repetition across all the stories and characters, because we’re sort of looking backwards, looking forwards, looking backwards, looking forwards. That’s the nature of narrative TV, but we don’t literally feel like we’re spinning our wheels.
DEADLINE: At the beginning of the season, we talked a lot about how Yas and Harper’s friendship could possibly be warped anymore. We have our answer, but where does this leave them going into Season 5?
DOWN: Oh, God, that would be divulging information.
DEADLINE: Well, what should we be mulling on in terms of that final interaction they have?
DOWN: Ask the question: Is it salvageable, given what happened? There needs to be some kind of relationship. I will say that. There is going to be some kind of relationship, but what that looks like going forward is, I mean, it’s up for grabs, and obviously we know, because we’ve beat out what happens in Season 5, but I think it’s too early to tell what the nature of that relationship is going to be or look like.
KAY: It runs antithetical to your job, Katie, and also to the internet, but my answer to that is people should probably just sit in what happened for more than one day. I know you’re only doing a job by asking what’s gonna happen next. What just happened, I reckon that can be a good year of stewing on while me and Mickey figure out what the f*ck is going to happen next [Laughs].
DEADLINE: I have appreciated throughout this show that you always let the characters be who they are going to be, even if it is not flattering or it is going to be a very tough pill to swallow. We saw that in some respects with all the characters this season, not just Yasmin, but in terms of her and Harper…how are you feeling about this path you’ve set them on — Harper being pulled toward this bit of light while Yasmin goes down a very dark road?
DOWN: I’ll start with Harper in that there’s been accusations leveled for her as a character. I’ve heard the word sociopath, psychopath bandied about, when I honestly think that the character we wrote in Season 1 was a character vibrating under the constraints of her environment. She was a mixed-race woman in London, an American woman who was in a cutthroat industry where she believed it to be a meritocracy, but realized quite quickly there were different ceilings to different people’s ambitions. She’s been pushing up against the obstacle of that for the whole of the four seasons. Once she was in the ecosystem of Pierpoint, she was moving through it in only the way that she had been taught by mentors like Eric, which is to be front-footed, to always have your eye on the prize and to really make no excuses about your ambition. That’s the way she behaved. It, firstly, pushed her out of the business in Season 2, and then brought her back in in a really operatic and big way in Season 3 and into 4. Now, what we wanted to do with Harper is we wanted to take her in a journey to the point where she had accrued all the power and wealth that she thought she was afforded. She has got to a position in her life now where she’s been successful. She’s had validation through that success. She had think pieces written about her in The New Yorker, and now she’s thinking, ‘All the things that I kind of let fall to the wayside — empathetic relationships, connective relationships with people that I love, the possibility of romance, possibility of actually having intimacy — all that stuff, now that the noise of finance and [my] ambition has kind of been dulled a bit, can come up to the surface.’
For the first time, she’s thinking about, ‘What does it look like to have a connected relationship with a man? What does it look like to be honest with someone?’ That has happened at the same time as really thinking about the costs of her ambition and the cost of the people around her. I mean, she’s obviously been incredibly successful in this season, but she’s done it at the cost of the people around her in that Sweetpea, who was obviously on this train of success with her as well, was assaulted in Episode 5. She’s lost Eric. She’s lost Rishi. I mean, not like Rishi was a huge part of her life, but as she said in Episode 8, the people who she thought were constants have either morphed something else or are completely gone. So now she’s thinking, ‘What is the point of everything?’ In a really reductive way, ‘What is the point of this ambition that I’ve been globbing on to for the first four seasons?’ I think it’s a really interesting place to take it, because we can now give the character a heart we’ve, in the first three seasons of the show, delved within. We explored what the operating system of people that were attracted to Pierpoint was like. In Season 4, we try to show, actually, if that operating system exists outside the world of Pierpoint. And, to a certain extent, it does, but someone like Harper, when she’s confronted with what the natural, inevitable progression of that operating system is in that room in Paris, which is surrounded by fascists, Neo-Nazis, opportunists, everything that you know is awful with the world, she starts to think, ‘God, have I really hitched myself to the wrong wagon?’
So, yeah, I think that it’s inevitable. I think that she becomes softer as a result of that and starts to think about things that she had previously not. Linking that to Yasmin, we don’t want to be as crass and reductive as saying we took a character that was scared of her own shadow and made her into a shadow. We took a character who seemingly should have been okay in this world, but we presented her in Season 1 as someone that just could not find their footing in it, because she was a vulnerable character. She was, as I said, scared of her own shadow. She was an ingenue. We wanted to excavate the things that we thought were always in the character and bring them to a natural conclusion in Season 4 and beyond. People have been talking in all these exit interviews about links to real world examples, obviously, but like the idea of this big villain arc for Yasmin, they’re feeling like it’s sort of a 180 in the character. If you’ve been watching Industry, all the scene setting for the character was there in Season 1. She’s always been attracted to vulnerable people and how she can manipulate them. She’s always been someone that’s been attracted to transactional relationships. She’s had that in her…She treated Robert like this. So, she’s gonna do this in Season 4. She’s someone that has trauma beget upon her. She’s someone that’s been a victim of that abuse, someone that feels that like ‘This is justifiable because of the way that I’ve been treated.’ She’s also an exercise in self rationalization in that ‘I can rationalize to myself that what I’m doing is good for the people around me,’ and a really weird counterpoint to Harper, who is like, ‘I know what I’m doing is bad for the people around me.’ Yasmin is like, ‘I’m giving all these women access. I’m giving them opportunity.’ It goes back to what she said to Venetia in Season 2, allow Nicole to touch your leg and to sexually assault you, because it might be good for your career. So yeah, it looks like we’ve done that in terms of taking Harper there and Yasmin here [holds up his arms in an X formation], and then crossing them. I think the groundwork has been laid for a while. Really practically, it’s not that interesting to see Harper with a foot on the accelerator every single season and not have any progression in character. And I feel like the thing that’s really exciting for me, and I speak for Konrad, is in [Season 5], we think we’ll see a slightly different Harper to the one we’ve seen in the previous four seasons.
DEADLINE: How do you feel as writers about pushing these characters into some pretty heinous territory? You clearly care about the characters, so is it difficult to for you to bring them to these places? Or are you having fun with it, in whatever way you can with a story like this?
KAY: You know what? I don’t think it is difficult. I’ll speak for Mickey [too]. We’ve never really talked about it, but I don’t find it difficult at all. I guess there’s a read of the Yasmin turn like, ‘Oh it’s slightly salacious. It’s slightly too on the nose for the moment. The guys were obviously leaning into the headlines a little too closely.’ What I find thrilling about that choice is that it was so organic for us, and it was so inevitable. We didn’t even discuss anything else. We were always building the train track to that moment, because it felt like, at least character-wise, was in the character’s DNA from the pilot. Everything Mickey said. Her interactions with herself, where she was finding her power, and it was drip fed through her relationship with her father [and] the small clues in Season 2, then the more overt ones in [Season 3].
For us to actually land…it was satisfying to — I’m trying to find a good metaphor. You send a rocket up, and then you’re like ‘We hope it’ll end up in space.’ That moment in Paris, for me, felt like we’re landing on the moon’s surface, having set off ages ago. For me and Mickey, it was like, ‘Let’s not be salacious. Let’s be true.’ That was a genuine instinct that we were both pursuing. Also, it’s kind of dramatically compelling to make the boldest choices, especially on long-form TV. That moment in Paris doesn’t work if you haven’t spent like 30 hours with Marisa’s character. People will be like, ‘That’s cheap as f*ck. What are they doing?’ I’m not trying to denigrate Ryan Murphy’s work. He’s f*cking brilliant, but there’s a version of this that’s like the Ghislaine Maxwell [as written by] Ryan Murphy story. You can see that version of that show. We just felt that it was the right place to take it.
All of these characters ultimately are on a quest for self actualization…By the time we finally see them, like, on a crude battery, what are they going to have left in their tank? Some are going to find it. Some are not going to find it. Some already found it and left the show. That’s not the perfect rubric by which we write it, but it really helps us think about the characters and their journeys.
DOWN: I mean, to your point about whether we find it difficult to take characters that we love, and we do love these characters, in dire directions… I just love the actors as well. I want to see Myha’la do something different. I want to see Marisa do something different. I know that these characters can bear the weight of this big storytelling and big dramatic turns, and we would never give them these things if we didn’t think they were empathetic performers. I feel like, even if you’re watching Marisa have this heel turn, you’re doing that, as Konrad said, under the weight of 30 hours of watching the character — because Marisa is somehow making the stuff that could never be empathized with empathetic. I love seeing what they can do. It goes back to Season 3, when we gave Eric his midlife crisis. We’ve seen Eric be this kind of head honcho on the trading floor with his bat, but I want to see him a broken man. I want to see him being the worst version of himself.
KAY: That’s so right. I never thought about it that purely, but it’s 100% true. In a feature film or something, you lose these people forever. You might have people you keep working with…but in TV, you’re like, ‘Oh, these people are going to come back and we get to write for them again.’ Therefore, it’s almost like, well, we know what they can do when we spread their wings. Let’s spread them even further. It’s a perverse, weird — I’ve never thought about like this, but Mickey just made me think about [how] it’s like a perverse test of them that comes from a deep respect and love for them, really. So much of anything, when you’re doing it on this side of the camera, is about trust. You have to trust and love the people you’re working with. Then out of that comes a sort of willingness to be brave. TV is so spent. It’s not like making a feature film, you’re so up against it. We shoot eight or nine pages a day. You have to have an incredible faith in the delivery of these people, to give them such a high wire act to tread, because otherwise you’d fall on your face about 25 times a day.
DEADLINE: Since you mention Eric, this season he reconnects with Harper during this time where he’s sort of reckoning with all that he’s done and potentially trying to break some cycles of harm. He clearly doesn’t know how. What lasting impact is that leaving on Harper, in terms of seeing this side of him only to have it crumble after that horrendous act?
DOWN: We’ve said before that, the show is kind of a series of missed connections or missed opportunities, I think, with one another. There’s a thing running through, especially in the first three seasons with PierPoint. PierPoint and the operating system in which Industry operates does not really value, or, is able to commodify vulnerability. You don’t get paid for being vulnerable on a trading floor. So what you do is you minimize that vulnerability, and you carry it. Whenever someone asks for it or offers it, you say, ‘No, I don’t want it.’ So that’s how Eric was brought up to behave, and that’s the thing that he has instilled in upon Harper, and it is actually to the detriment of their relationship in the first half of the season, because Eric comes back having been away from Pierpoint, having this sort of a rival fellow success that Harper achieves at the end of Season 4, and says, ‘I want to have a empathetic relationship with someone that I mentored and someone that maybe I didn’t do well by in the first three seasons.’ Harper isn’t quite yet there on her journey.
The first conversation they have when he comes back to London, he’s welling up. He’s talking about getting at the end of it and his aging. He says, ‘When you’re young, you’ve got all these ideas. When you get to the end of it, all you’ve got is…’ And then she jumps in and intersects and says, ‘Money.’ I always thought that what he was about to say was experience, tutelage. He says, ‘Oh, yeah, actually money.’ Because everything aggregates around to money in that moment, especially Harper. You can just say he’s trying to have her as a surrogate for his daughters, who he has basically failed and who he doesn’t think are really quite worthy of his love in a really pathological way, or he thinks that ‘I’ve lost them even though they’re f*cking 13-year-old girls.’ He thinks ‘My relationship with them is over.’ So he cosplays a father to Harper, and because Harper is just totally single-minded in her pursuit of Tender, she’s not ready for it. She doesn’t want it. As with all great drama, it’s only too late when they realize that, actually, the thing they needed from one another is going to be gone forever because the actions that Eric has done, right? That’s the worst possible timing.
We had to make loads of concessions for the time, but there was a moment where the trade is working, and they had that moment, SternTao as a group, where they’re celebrating, and Eric’s talking about the Mets. That’s as far as their relationship can go, in terms of how proud he is of her. In our show, that’s the equivalent of, like, a long huck, because that’s two characters who have never really been able to say their feelings for one another. The same with Episode 5, and they talk about Harper’s mother. We take them to a position where they’re actually going to be tender and open up to another. Then we, because it’s Industry, gut it and undercut it with a horrible moment, because Eric ultimately would just refer to return to default.
DEADLINE: Speaking of kind of returning to default, I was talking to Kit recently about the finale, and he said he feels like there’s something to be said for Henry’s understanding of manhood and masculinity, which he feels he hasn’t fully worked out. We were talking about the final scene with Henry, on the boat with his uncle and how that is a bit of a return to default for him as well…Do you have any thoughts there?
KAY: Yeah, it’s hard, isn’t it, because, in a way, we introduce his father as this sort of LSD phantom hallucination of a part of his psyche, which is obviously a very overblown version of what his father was probably like, with a huge kernel of truth in it. But I’d say, as a role model, he obviously had this incredibly misogynistic father. I read a few things online, which we didn’t do deliberately, but I do think there are some weird echoes of what Whitney is telling him to be. He’s got this part of his ego. He says to Yasmin, ‘You always made me chase the most egoistic part of myself.’ I think there’s part of him which thinks, because of his station and because of what he’s been afforded, he needs to transcend the fact that he’s been given everything. His version of that is to do, you know, capital G, capital W, ‘Good Works’ in the world, and that’s either building a company that genuinely helps people, being a politician, this idea of noblesse oblige — I need to give back to the society that gave me everything. But he’s also just and incredibly selfish prisoner to his sexuality and with his drug [addiction], taking his worst impulses. He’s his own worst enemy. He’s sort of naive and not as smart as he thinks he is, which, to us…there’s a bit of a comment on the sort of people who who fail upwards in British society because they’re born with a silver spoon in their mouths, to put it pretty crudely.
I think the thing that was interesting this season, for me and Mickey, when Kit was playing him, and Kit came off and said, ‘You know what? I think I love this guy, even though he’s obviously heinous and has all these flaws.’ The truth is, I think he was a bit like Harper, and Harper’s was a slightly more coded, a subtler arc, in a way, I think. A little bit more of a muted arc, because Henry’s was so sort of bombastic, operatic. He was one of those characters where he felt soulless and like a bit of a jester in Season 3, saying all this parodic stuff about Kamala Harris and stuff. I think in Season 4, he really believed that he had a chance to do good again, and his soul was kind of weirdly intact. He’s treated Yasmin pretty f*cking horrendously. I’m not saying that he’s a forgivable character, but I think Kit played him with the soulfulness that kind of made you weirdly root for him, especially when Whitney was getting his claws in, right?
So, I don’t know if I answered your question. His role models are strange because his memories of his father are horrendous, and his father’s suicide obviously totally brutalized his own childhood, and his memories of it. Then, in Lord Norton, he has this quite hyper masculine, reserved figure of Englishness. I think he’s wanted to make himself his own father. He’s wanted to be the hero of his own narrative. He has this grandiose version of what his life should be, and it’s not transpired like that. He’s a figure of huge tragic comedy, where he ends up. I love his ending, because, we went back and forth, me and Mickey, about whether to kill him. We thought, ‘Well, look, he’s going to be on a boat. He’s going to be on lithium…and he’s going to effectively be like, well, this is my lot. I’m back where I started.’ Guys like that don’t have to go to jail. They don’t have to put the handcuffs off on in the car. They just get a slap on the wrist, and they go back to the estate, right?
DEADLINE: So, should we take this as the end of his time on Industry?
DOWN: No, no.
KAY: Who knows!
DOWN: We’re not going to commit to anything.
