‘Industry’ Season 3 Finale Interview with Mickey Down, Konrad Kay

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains plot details for “Infinite Largesse,” the Season 3 finale of HBO’s “Industry.” 

It’s a good thing HBO announced the renewal of “Industry” for a fourth season before Sunday’s finale, because fans might otherwise fear the episode marked the end of the series. After Season 2 culminated in antiheroine Harper Stern (Myha’la) getting fired from the bank Pierpoint & Co., initially the focal point of “Industry,” Season 3 completes the fracturing of the show’s core characters. Publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) lost her job at Pierpoint earlier in the season; now, she’s exited finance altogether, embracing her destiny as the socialite bride-to-be of aristocrat Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Working-class hero Robert (Harry Lawtey) has jumped ship for a psilocybin startup, with a trendy new haircut to match.

Most jarringly of all, Pierpoint itself is effectively no more. After overexposing itself in so-called ethical investing, the bank has sprinted in the other direction, selling itself to a shell company for a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund with a crucial assist from recently elevated partner Eric Tao (Ken Leung). As a reward, the London trading floor Eric ruled over with a baseball bat as his royal scepter has been shut down. After railing against Harper all season for her lack of moral compass, Eric has sold out more completely than his ex-mentee ever has, knifing his terminally ill friend Bill Adler (Trevor White) in the back in return for a $20 million buyout and indefinite unemployment.

As for Harper herself, the rule-breaking maverick is homeward bound. Having once organized her life around escaping her dysfunctional family, going so far as to torpedo a deal last season that hinged on relocating to her home state of New York, Harper is starting an all-shorts fund — as in, betting on businesses to fail — based in the Big Apple and backed by rapacious financier Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay). In doing so, Harper walks away from Leviathan Alpha, the successful fund she built with partner Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg) and staffed with Pierpoint defectors. Harper isn’t a team player, even when that team shares her favorite ax to grind.

“Industry” creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay aren’t resting on their laurels after a breakout Season 3, which saw the series rise to new heights of viewership and critical acclaim. “We get excited by the fact that we can just blow everything up,” Down says. That includes not just dispersing the cast, but shocking the audience with twists that seem outside the series’ purview, like when trader Rishi’s (Sagar Radia) loan shark suddenly shoots his wife in the head, instantly killing her. Down and Kay are just starting to write Season 4 now, and even they don’t quite know where the show goes from here. Recently, the two showrunners spoke with Variety about burning the show to the ground, hoping they’d get the chance to build it back up again.

Blowing up Pierpoint is such a radical alteration to the show’s status quo. What made feel ready to take that step in the life of this series?

Konrad Kay: The truth is, a lot of it was trying to tell the best possible story in the eight hours that we knew we were going to be able to have. So to be frank, we were not thinking about Season 4, Season 5 of the show. We were thinking, what is the most complete story? And, a bit like Season 2 with Harper getting fired, it felt narratively satisfying.

But also, me and Mickey give years of our lives to each season. This is not network TV; this is not 21 episodes of a show in a hospital. What is exciting to us, just me and him as a creative pair, is: fuck, we’re gonna do this again for another two years. How can we make the show different? Not that the trading floor was a crutch, but it was very much a workplace drama. Part of what excited us is the potential of, if Pierpoint doesn’t exist, what the hell does the show look like? 

To us, it was a perfect conclusion for the story we were trying to tell with Eric: capitalism dying and then being reborn, and not having any space for any of the characters we love in it — which felt like a very true motif for us. And then it was like, fuck — if we do do this and come back for Season 4, we’re gonna have to go and play in a different sand pit. Now that the show has been renewed, we can talk about how we’re working on the first two episodes. It feels freeing to us. We don’t feel that compulsion to go back to the trading floor. It feels like the show can operate at a totally different level.

How did HBO react when you told them Pierpoint was over?

Mickey Down: I mean, we were debating it right up until the last moment of the writers’ room. I can’t remember how it first came about, the idea of actually exploding Pierpoint, but definitely at the initial stages of it, we thought, God, are we doing the right thing? We had this back and forth with our producers, with HBO. They were like, “This is the precinct of the show.” As Konrad said, we get excited by the fact that we can just blow everything up in general. We write ourselves into corners. We write ourselves out of them. We love the idea that the show can be totally different season to season. This was us putting a gun to our heads and saying, “If we were to come back, what would we do?” When we explained it like that. HBO was like, “OK, go for it.”

Harper and Eric are so complementary. Last season ended with Eric throwing Harper under the bus, but almost for her own good; this time, he throws Bill under the bus for real, and effectively helps murder Pierpoint. He’s become more Harper-like. Why did you feel that was the fitting conclusion to Eric’s arc? 

Down: I really like that interpretation of it, that he becomes more Harper-like. He learns from her. We’ve always described this as a mentor-mentee relationship, but where Eric is the mentor. Eric is the old cowboy who is basically at the end of his career, and Harper is the young gunslinger who’s just nipping at his heels. But there’s definitely a sense that he’s becoming more Harper-like in Season 3. He’s been way less apologetic for the way that he lives his life, in a way that he’s probably learned from Harper — and maybe scares him a little bit. 

Kay: It sounds so reductive, but for us in the writers’ room, it was a very simple story about a guy selling his soul. He is the ultimate sellout, right? He forms a relationship, one of his only true human relationships, with Adler. Adler confides the most personal piece of information he could possibly confide about himself in his illness, which is the moment of real vulnerability between them in Episode 5. Then he weaponizes that to kill him. He becomes the apparatus of this much bigger capitalist superstructure where he basically has to go and give a speech where he effectively weaponizes his history in the place, his identity in a totally cynical way, but is actually really rabble-rousing and gets everybody on side. Then he walks into the trading floor. He’s in a graveyard. He’s $20 million richer, but all of his colleagues are gone. It’s totally silent, and he’s effectively a king with no kingdom. I think it’s a very clear story.

The other drastic event in this finale that scrambles the viewer’s understanding of what the show can do is the death of Rishi’s wife. I was similarly curious about the decision-making that led you up to that point.

Down: That was another thing that was hotly debated. Actually, we came up with that after the writers’ room. Me and Konrad are usually writing during production; we’re continually honing as we get closer to the end of principal photography. And we knew we were directing those episodes. 

This was actually borne out of a directive from HBO to continue the Rishi runner throughout the last few episodes, because we initially conceived the Rishi episode as totally separate from the rest of the story. Like, we’re going to pop into his life, see what it’s like. He’s going to be unchanged by the end, because that’s who he is. And then we’re going to go back and basically suggest that that’s what Rishi does all the time, in a kind of facetious way. But then HBO thought the idea of Rishi having a gambling addiction and massive amounts of debt was interesting, and that we shouldn’t let it slide. 

Then we started to think, how could we use Rishi’s story to show that there are actual consequences in this world, even for people who have never felt them before? We thought, we need to crystallize that idea in a really dramatic way. The initial conception was that we were going to have Rishi get shot. Then we thought, that’s actually allowing him off a little bit too easily. And we love Sagar; we would probably want to bring him back. So we thought, “What is actually more devastating for him than him being killed? The one person who understands and loves him, who isn’t a two-year-old toddler, being killed in front of him.” 

So we wrote it in the script and we gave it to HBO, and it’s pretty much the only time where they were like, “I don’t know about this, guys.” Usually, they’re really receptive to our ideas. They push us in a really good way. They tell us to be more provocative, and to go further. And this time they were like, “Maybe it’s just too far.” We thought, we don’t want to jump the shark. We want to execute it in a way which suits the grammar of the show. We’re directing it, so we know it’s going to be as grounded as possible. So we said, “Let’s just shoot it.” 

Even then, when they watched it in assembly, they were like, “Guys, how is this going to fit into the wider narrative? How is this going to fit in the episode?” We said, “Let us just put it in the episode and see what you think.” The whole time, we were saying, “If you don’t like it, then we can have another conversation about it.” Once they saw it within the context of the episode, they thought it worked really well. It actually, I think, feels like a really good demarcation between pre- and post-Pierpoint “Industry,” because there’s a coda at the end of the season where everyone seems to have grown up. The idea of going back to Season 4 and seeing how that affected Rishi, seeing how real consequences changed him, is super exciting. 

Kay: The reason HBO balked at it — it wasn’t just the violence. It just felt outside the grammar of what we’d established in the show. But the show is evolving. We are as creators, and the actors are as actors. Why can’t the show be something else? It’ll always be about business. It will always be about the intersection of these people’s lives and the capitalist instinct. But that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it has to be confined to a trading floor, because these things bleed into all parts of our lives. We’re very interested in the intersection of politics and media and finance, and Season 4 is going to have a lot more of that, I would bet. That doesn’t have to be on a trading floor. It’s still a business show. It’s just maybe not going to be a trading floor show. 

The idea that there was maybe an inappropriately sexual element to the Charles-Yasmin relationship is something that’s hinted at throughout the season, then explicitly named in that final scene in a way that’s quite jarring. Was that always how you thought about that relationship, or did that dynamic emerge over the course of the show?

Down: It was subconsciously there, but emerged as an actual idea from the beginning of Season 2, when we introduced the character. But then again, we never want to come down too hard on what actually happened, because it’s very important, I think, even from Marisa’s performance, to not know what happened. We never told her what happened, and she asked us. We said, “We’re never going to tell you, because we want you to play it as if you don’t remember. As if there’s something that’s there that feels sensory, but nothing explicit.” 

There’s so many hints to it in the second and third seasons. The idea of sex is a huge part of their household. She talks about the fact that she saw her mum performing fellatio on the guy they chartered the boat from. They talk about Charles with beer breath coming to her room in Berlin. There’s loads of little hints at it, but there’s nothing explicit, because Yasmin doesn’t have any explicit primary knowledge of it. Long winded way of saying, we’d love the audience to project whatever they feel onto it and for them to make up their own minds. Sometimes that feels like a bit of a cop out. But in this situation, I feel like it’s actually quite apt.

Yasmin ultimately opts for safety and security without emotional intimacy in Henry, versus this connection that she has with Robert. Was there ever a universe where she would have made a different choice, or is that just always who the character has been?

Kay: I don’t think Robert and Yasmin should be together, to be perfectly honest. I can understand the romantic element of it, but I don’t think they’re a particularly good match on almost any level. They were avatars of certain desires and status desires for each other in the first season, and then they became good friends and comforts to each other. But as a romantic partnership, they never fully made sense,

Down: Completely. Part of Episode 7 is showing that. There was a line that we had which felt a little bit too on the nose, so we removed it. Yasmin says, “Stop being such a fucking man of the people all the time. It’s fucking exhausting.” And he’s like, “Man of the people? This is just who I am! You’ve never interacted with me outside of the context of Pierpoint!” He’s right. They’re colleagues. They had a relationship which was borne out of looking at each other while one of them was photocopying, or in the gym. For Yasmin, it was a valve release from a very staid and boring relationship. Then it grew into something because they spent so much time together, in the way that lots of office relationships do. But then, actually, as soon as they’re outside of Pierpoint, they’re just like, “God, we’ve got absolutely nothing in common, nothing. We don’t want the same things. We’re not animated by the same stuff. We don’t find the same stuff funny. We’re just brought together by Pierpoint.” Which is another central thesis of the show: These people aren’t really your friends, your lovers. They’re not really your companions. You just share the same carpet 20 hours a day.

The other partnership that dissolves in this episode is Petra and Harper. What’s your read on why Harper cannot deal with being part of a team?

Kay: If it was “Better Call Saul,” you probably would have had a whole episode of that scene towards the end of the season where Anraj brings the donuts in. You would have had a whole episode of Harper —

Down: Probably a whole season, if it was “Better Call Saul”! Complimentary.

Kay: Exactly. She’d have been bouncing a ball against the wall. She’s not a person who likes to meditate on her past or her inner life too much. Stasis, any kind of stability or comfort, I think she fucking rejects outright. She always needs to be moving forward. If she gets the top of the mountain, what the fuck do you do at the top of the mountain? You need the next peak.

Why she goes back to Otto is, she thinks she can win big because she’s prepared to play in a way that other people don’t play, and she wants that reward. But also there’s a moral equivocation of, “I don’t think what I’m doing is wrong. I just think I’m doing what everyone else is doing. They’re just not doing it well enough not to be caught.” 

She thinks of herself as a lone wolf as well. That’s just her nature. We’ve watched her for three seasons. We know she really struggles with the idea of intimacy, even though she craves it. There are loads of images of her with all the Bloomberg monitors in her hotel room. Maybe that’s how she’s happiest.

It feels so weighty and symbolic when Harper says she’s ready to go home, since she’s resisted that so fiercely in the past. What made you feel like she had gotten to the point where she was ready to go back stateside?

Down: The way that Petra is able to be good at her job is to compartmentalize things. Whereas Harper, the thing that’s actually holding her back — this is something she’s probably still figuring out — it’s her aggressive revenge against Pierpoint. Which is the thing that pushes her towards being short on them and pushes her towards her major business action of the season. And she could ask the question: “Would it be better if I actually took Petra’s advice, and leave whatever animus I have toward my former employer at the door and get on with my job?” 

By the end, I think she’s started to think, maybe my professional life and my personal life shouldn’t be so mixed. Maybe she’s learned a few things from Petra, and maybe she thinks, I should probably stop allowing the trauma of the past couple of seasons to infect every single aspect of my life. I think she’s growing up as well. I think she wants to maybe tackle these things head on a little bit more. We haven’t shown what is so awful about America. For her, I mean!

Kay: Practically, we thought it was a way of broadening the horizons of the show. To give us a bit of a runway of story into Season 4, and it might entice HBO into letting us continue to tell the story. 

One of my favorite themes of the show has been the way superficial progressivism or diversity covers up for, but never actually changes, naked capitalism. This season finds the perfect expression of that idea in ESG investing. What appeals to you about that element of the story?

Down: We’ve created a world which is very hard-edged, where one has to leave their vulnerability at the door in order to be successful, where the things that people usually prize in humanity, whether it be compassion or connection, are not the valid currency. ESG felt like a really good microcosm of that, because it was just asking the question, “Can you be a good person and make lots of money?” That’s the question Pierpoint is asking for the majority of the season, before it all goes to hell. 

The way that we think about ESG in the show as well, is just like, “Where’s the line in terms of being a good person?” People in the show are able to be altruistic and good and think about others and be compassionate — up to the point where it continues to make them money. As soon as it comes into opposition with them making money or being successful, they suddenly forget all that positive stuff. They revert to their own self-advancement. This is a really long-winded way of saying, we find that really interesting. A show about well-meaning people in finance, I’m not sure we’d be talking about Season 4.

Can I ask where you are in the planning process of Season 4? 

Kay: By Season 3 standards, at this point, we actually have way more than we did. Me and Mickey are currently writing the first two episodes, and we’re fucking excited. You can quote me on that. We’re fucking excited! We’ve worked on this show for years now, and so much of stuff becomes production and direction, but the actual origination process, even before the writers’ room,  it’s just so exciting for us — to talk about the characters and the possibilities and spend hours asking, what could it look like? There’s no fear. There’s so much more to do. That’s the kind of thing that is the most energizing. There’s so much possibility.

The season ends with everyone scattered to the four winds. Going forward, are Myha’la, Ken Leung, Marisa Abela and Harry Lawtey still the core cast? 

Down: I’m sure you’re expecting this answer, but we can’t give too much away. Good things are worth waiting for.

This interview has been edited and condensed.