Spoiler warning for Industry's Season 3 finale. You’ve been warned!
Industry is one of the best shows of 2024.
The third season aired its extended finale on September 29, which fundamentally changed the trajectory for all the show’s major players. The trading floor where so much of the series’ action occurs is no longer taken over by a rival bank and sent out to pasture. Harper (Myha’la) is about to start her own fund, backed by the shadowy Otto. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is engaged to Henry Muck (Kit Harington) to save herself from an impending storm related to her father’s wrongdoings. Eric (Ken Leung) is jobless. Robert (Harry Lawtey) is eyeing Silicon Valley. Oh, and Rishi (Sagar Radia) just saw his wife murdered in front of his eyes. Needless to say, the world of Industry is going to look a lot different when it returns for its fourth season.
That’s something the show's co-creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, are excited to explore. This season saw the scribes step into the director’s chair for the last two episodes, bringing with them a few new visual flourishes as they steered the ship into bold new waters. In the interim time between when this conversation took place and now, HBO has already renewed the show for a fourth season, which means the bold new direction they’re hard at work planning for the show—and teased below—will be coming to fruition. It’s a victory lap of sorts for a tremendous season that’s elevated the show to new heights.
Complex sat down for an expansive conversation with Down and Kay to talk about what the next season might look like, why these episodes made sense for them to direct, the logic behind killing Diana, and more.
With episodes seven and eight, you’re making the jump over to directing these installments yourselves. Was this something you always wanted to do? What made these two episodes the right ones to jump in for?
Mickey Down: It's something I wanted to do, basically, from the start of our career. The second thing that me and Konrad wrote together was something we directed ourselves, a micro-budget feature called Gregor, which we raised the money [for] from Kickstarter. Despite the size of it, it was an amazing creative experience. We love being on set as producers, and it's obviously very involving to be executive producers and showrunners of the show.
There's something about directing and the access it gives you to the actors, the access it gives you to the camera department, the visual stamp you can put on it, the fact you have to think about a million different things; I find that super invigorating. It's something that me and Konrad should have been doing from the start, and we hope to do in the future more.
Konrad Kay: TV, they talk about it being a writer's medium versus a director's medium, but given we wrote the thing that we were directing, [it] can be a bit of a thankless task for a TV director when me and Mickey are so authorial in everything that we want, and the fact that we write the scripts. We have amazing collaborators in the director department—like Isabella Eklöf directed a lot this season. In a way, it was very freeing because we—not that we were micromanaging, but there was always that sense of the presence over her shoulder sometimes. There was a level of confidence when we got behind the camera in terms of what we wanted. There was a shorthand with the actors, there was a speed to it. It felt like we were making everything more efficient. It was more enjoyable, I think, from that point of view.
MD: It just streamlined the process. As you said, Konrad, everything felt focused. We obviously sit in the edit so we know exactly we want. If we got it in two takes, we could be out. We shot long episodes; they ended up being over length, but we shot a lot of material for them. If you get to the third season of a show, which you wrote the majority of the episodes for, it tends to be very authorial. It was only on this show that we would be allowed to direct a show for HBO, having done 24 episodes of it now.
The way it came about is we were looking for a director for the last block. I had the back of my mind with Konrad that we should do it. It was an exercise in running the clock down with HBO to the point where we were the only real choice. But to be fair to them, when we pitched ourselves to them, they were supportive. Considering how much would be on set and being involved in the creative process, from casting to every aspect of production ever, really, they were like, “Go for it, guys.”
There are a few new-looking shots in this episode—a handful of Rishi on the floor and one of Marisa on the stairs in the finale—that feel like you two are adding new flourishes to the visuals. Can you talk me through incorporating those?
MD: The director of photography, Fede Cesca, who did the majority of the episodes, we have an amazing relationship with. Even though he had been shooting the last block and was exhausted, he wanted to work with us. We were desperate to work with him on our episodes, thinking about how to expand the visual palette of the show and make it, literally in those episodes, feel more expansive, considering that we were shooting in boardrooms with lots of people, and we were shooting in really great locations in Somerset where they shot Barry Lyndon, and we were shooting in candlelight.
We're like, “How do we make this thing feel big in a really small way.” Which is a basic way of saying it, but he introduced us to a 12-millimeter lens, which gives you massive amounts of depth feel and gives you that really wide angle that you've seen. Me and Konrad were always trying to figure out what that was, because we’re talking about films like Knight of Cups, that Terrence Malick film, where he uses that lens the entire time. It has this effect where if you go very close, the subject of the picture feels very, very close with the slight fishing around it.
Is it an anamorphic lens?
MD: Yeah, exactly, but to an extreme. We just loved the way it looked. It felt very subjective and places them in a huge landscape.
KK: We loved it because it basically gave us size without forsaking all the intimacy that we wanted for the show. It gives you both at once. It’s an ace card in the deck. The shots you're talking about are really good because you're very with Rishi, incredibly close and in his state of mind, which is agitated, angry, and then the whole world is sort of above his head.
MD: We've never seen the this top of the trading floor before.
KK: Yeah!
MD: We built these amazing lights that come on automatically when someone walks into the floor, and we never see them in the context of people on the floor because it was either like, we push up and see them, or we have intimate, close shots of people on the floor. Seeing it all for the first time was revelatory because we were like, “Fuck, we should have used this way more in the earlier blocks and seasons.”
How much of Yasmin’s decision to marry Henry comes from the desire to insulate herself with someone who has power and resources versus her exchange with Lord Norton being the first legitimately sincere and loving paternal relationship we’ve seen her have on the show?
KK: It’s a little bit of everything. Me and Mickey discussed a lot, with Marisa as well, the love versus practicality question. Like everything in the show, it is not one or the other. In different moments, both have a more important valence for her decision-making. She does love Henry; it's a very different feeling to the one she has for Rob. Maybe it's freighted with all the stuff of like, “This is the life you can give me. This is the life I lost. This is what our marriage might look like.” But also, she's attracted to Henry. He's confident, he's fun. They meet each other on a level.
The proposal scene, even though obviously, there are lies within the scene, and there's a sense in the way the camera is placed as well that Yasmin is lying to him when she says she loves him. There's still a lot of emotional honesty there. They’re like, “This is what I want. Are you going to give it to me?” That’s not a relationship she’s had with very many people in the show. Yes, she’s marrying all the wealth, the safety of all that, and Norton as a surrogate father figure. But there’s also the element of—she’s not marrying in a sort of courtly, 19th century, this is a marriage of convenience kind of way, I don’t think.
MD: Definitely not. There was a scene that we removed in the episode, which came after she got to Lord Norton's house, where she sat on the bed and told Rose, the head of Hanani Publishing, that she was going to accept this offer that she'd given in the previous episode, and therefore the walls were no longer in the door. It was a reflection of something we wanted to achieve in the writers room, which I hope we already did, which is we didn't want it to feel like a quid pro quo, transactional marriage. We didn't want it to feel like, “Oh, I have this problem here. You have the resources to stop the problem, so I'm going to marry you.” We felt like all this nice nuance and subtlety and multi-dimensionality, which Konrad has said, would be gone.
We basically got into the cut, and we thought, “We're letting her off way too easily by giving her that out.” It felt really rushed, and we lost it. Hopefully, we still have the multi-dimensionality of her choice without it. It does feel that she's holding onto something which is going to be able to support her and shelter her. But I do think all that stuff about the companionship he's going to bring her, the love—all that stuff is all written there as well.
In Rob’s speech that bookends the episode, and even in some of the comments Eric makes in his comments at Pierpoint about “building a bridge with your beliefs,” how much of that is you using the characters to talk about you both feeling like, “We have made something really special. We feel like we've gotten our hands around the show in a strong way. This is us, selling ourselves to show you what we can do, not only now but moving forward.” Was it as intentional as that? Or am I reading too much into the situation?
KK: You mean the feel of Episode 8 as a template for future seasons of the show and us directing it? Or do you mean that, literally, the dialog they're saying is somehow referential to me and Mickey?
A little bit of both. The idea of Rob saying, “You've been conditioned to expect this sort of thing, come with us on this journey, it's going to be spectacular.” Even with Eric’s speech, as creatives, you’re working with other partners, and they come to you because you have these beliefs, these creative ideas, and there's a mutual buy in on both parties. To me, it felt like a metaphor for the creative process in some ways, and tied into you guys making this transition into directing, and it feels like you’re saying, “We're betting ourselves. You can see the actual results of how it all comes together. Now, come with us.”
MD: I haven't thought about that. I love that, William [laughs]. I don't know if you thought about—
KK: No, not at all, Not once.
MD: The ending of Robert saying, “Join us on the bottom floor of a spectacular journey,” is a little nod to the fact that there could be more to come, that we’re not done yet, and our best work is ahead of us. As you said, we directed for the first time. We were super creatively energized by that. We got to the end of season three—the edit, the delivery—and we wanted to do more. I don't feel we've used our best ideas. I don't think we've hit a wall. I don't think that the show hasn't got anything more to say or to do. I honestly think we feel like we're just getting started because, in some ways, we found how the show works best for us.
This isn’t exactly a series finale, but tonally, it feels like it could be, even with some moments that feel like groundwork for future seasons. Did you want closure in case you didn’t have a chance to move forward? What was that decision process?
KK: We always wanted Pierpoint to have an existential, Margin Call moment. And then we thought, “Well, why pull our punch? The bank should change fundamentally. It shouldn't just be bailout and roll on as it was.” We put pretty much a full stop at the end of the season because of the renewal thing and because we want the story to feel self-contained. We also quite like the challenge of writing ourselves into a situation, we'd have to write ourselves out for and for the show to come back and be a very different thing.
When Harper got fired, the show was going to be different. When Pierpont is bought by Al-Mi’raj, the show is going to inevitably be different. I think part of it as well was, the training floor has been an amazing place for the show. It's a great energy giver, a great place to set stories, and it was a great jumping off point for meeting all the characters. But we've grown up. The actors have grown up, and the characters have grown up. The show is a bildungsroman of their lives, this innocence to experience. You watch them grow up on screen. We're doing that behind the camera. We were excited by season three about how much we enjoyed writing scenes like Select Committee, climate conference, Otto's character, Lisa Dern, the Labour MP of the Select Committee—pieces of the puzzle that literally didn't really have anything to do with banking, but were more about power, success, class and all the things we've always wanted to write about.
So, to us, it felt like an organic thing. The show will always be about finance and these people, but it's a show about the characters. When we were writing the ending, it didn't really scare us that we were scorching the earth, because we were like, “Well, if we get to do it again, it’s gonna have to, by its very nature, be different to keep us creatively engaged in it.” The show growing and changing, treats the audience with a lot of respect. You've watched the coda. You’ve seen all of those characters. They're all markedly different to the people, not only that you met [in] season one, but [to] the people you met at the start of season three. They're people who've outgrown the bank in some ways, but that doesn't mean that their interpersonal journeys are not still going to be really interesting and worth following.
Can you talk about the decision to kill Diana and how you both thought through that?
MD: That was one of the moments where me and Konrad snowballed our writing because we came up with the Rishi story [in episode four]. We wanted that to feel like a contained thing. At the end of it, he doubles back down on his old behavior. That was a reflection of the fact that everything's cyclical, he had a Gambler's mentality, and he was addicted to losses as much as he was addicted to winning. We did think like, “We need to show the consequences of this. We need to show there are consequences in this world, and there are consequences for people who have never felt them before.”
HBO also wanted us to keep that as a runner, because they thought it was a big thing to have happened in the middle of the season, for Rishi to have this reprieve and to basically get out of this hole he was in. We just thought, “Ok, well, that’s something that happens over there.” You could almost suggest that happens to Rishi on a quarterly basis. Then, they thought it was something we shouldn’t let go. We kept thinking about how can we bring Vinay back into the story? What’s happening with the syndicate? Has Rishi been collecting more money? Then we just thought, “What is the biggest thing we could possibly do to show there are consequences?”
The initial idea was that he killed Rishi. We just thought, “Okay, well, for multiple reasons, we didn't want to do that. We love Sagar. We want to bring him back if we do his fourth season.” We just thought that feels like—I don't know why that feels more like jumping a shark to me than what we actually put in, but it didn't feel very Industry. The death of a main character in such a violent way felt like it was a little bit of a betrayal. But then we start thinking, “What if someone very close to him is killed?” Obviously, the perfect person was the innocent person in his life, the person who bailed him out, the person that he knows the best, he's only tether to humanity. Then we came up with that.
It was quite—firstly, between me and Konrad—a big idea because we felt it was something the show never done before. We've had little snippets of violence or suggestions of it, but we never had anything as shocking as that. HBO borked at it. They were like, “This is not the show. We're worried about the reaction.” It was originally an outline. We were like, “Let us write it in the script and see what you think.” They read it in the script and were like, “Yeah, we're not sure about this.” Then we were like, “Okay, let us shoot it,” and they were like, “Ah, okay, fine, fine.” We shot it. They looked at the dailies and were like, “Mmm, we’re not really sure about this. God, this is pretty gruesome.” My wife, as well, just [couldn’t] watch it, even in the dailies. Then, we put it within the episode, and I think when they first watched it in context, they thought this works really well. It's so shocking and diabolical.
It’s such a big moment, and it is a huge turning point in the tone, tenor, and stakes of the show up to this point. I know that someone dies in the first episode, but this is real consequence to pretty appalling behavior. Hari’s death was brought on by himself, but it wasn't anything he had done wrong to other people. He was the victim of his own ambition, but he wasn't. He wasn't the victim of someone else's [ambition], or someone else's avarice, or whatever. It just felt like a really horrible beat, which is kind of dark in the show. I'm not saying that the show's gonna become a revenge fantasy. But it felt like the ratcheting up of something that the show could possibly do. We were all nervous about it. I'm still nervous about it. I wonder how people are gonna respond to it because it is such a brutal moment. But I think within the context of the episode, it works really well.
KK: We created a universe where, for better or worse, characters with conscience and morals seem to always end up at the bottom of the pile. This was just quite literal this time. Kenny gets reformed; the moment he shows signs of change, he gets cut from the bank. Hari, obviously, is very innocent, just wants to work really hard. Diana felt organic. Some of the stuff she says in [episode] four is very in touch with her own emotions, with her sense of self, and she feels very mature and, in some ways, a weird partner for Rishi, but you also understand why they’re in love. It felt true to us that she would die a horrendous death because of something that he'd done.
The universe of the show—that's the sort of thing that comes for you. It's impossible to survive in this world if you're like her, I guess, on some big macro level. I think it's really grotesque, that scene. It’s shocking and borderline. We wanted to take risks with it, and it felt very true to us as we were doing it. Then, the way it started to come together in the cut felt very true to HBO as well.
MD: We cut line as well, William, because it felt like no one should be talking after something that happens, but there's a line where Vinay said, “Talk your way out of that.” It’s the punctuation that Rishi, up at this point, has been able to get out everything, right? It’s just the gift for Gab he has, and this is something he cannot talk his way out of. This is irreversible for the first time in his life.
KK: You asked us about the metaness of some of our writing, like are we talking about our directorial career in the dialog? No, but there is a thinking about the way plot works and plot armor works. We were conscious of this as we were writing it, which is basically like, people watch episode four of season three, and they love it. Like, this is a great ride for some people. Obviously me and Mickey read about the show, like, “Oh, this feels so unlike the show. It almost feels like a dream sequence!” Why the fuck has someone been rewarded for that behavior? Only plot mechanics and the plot armor of a writer's room would protect a character like that.
I think a lot of people, critical eyes of the show, would be like, “You know what? These writers are not good enough to A, bring this story strand back, and B, make it meaningful.” Which is totally fine. To us, it feels like the real-world consequence of that stuff. This is something that could happen, from this point of view, that doesn't protect the character and deeply changes his circumstances as well.
It comes right after Otto's exchange with Harper—where he talks about living in a world without fear—it feels like you’re almost priming the audience for it. On the subject of seeding things for the next season, the topic of America comes up a lot. Whether it's Gus being out there now, Rob talking about a move to Silicon Valley, or Harper talking about potentially coming back to New York. Is a move to America on the table? Am I aiming in the right direction with that thought? Or is that something you guys are working out?
MD: We're working out. I think you have to wait and see on that. It’s more about nod to new beginnings than actually moving the show. I will say, though, that those two scenes together—the Otto scene where he tells Harper about a world without fear and then followed by a Rishi scene—it's a suggestion that there is an even more dark undercurrent to the world than we've seen in Industry already. Harper, by getting into bed with Otto, suggesting the kind of fund that they’re going to start, is opening up the door to that underworld. Then, you see an example of it. It’s not an explicit link to the world that Harper would inhabit, but it's a link that there are very high stakes to the world that she's potentially opening up for herself.
Between the relentless moment at the start of the season, Diana’s comment about raising strong boys instead of fixing broken men, and even some of Norton's conversation with Yasmin, what are you guys trying to say about masculinity with the show?
KK: Trading floors, from like the '80s onwards, and in terms of the way they've been portrayed on screen since then, are typically associated with performing a kind of masculinity, right? A kind of hypermachismo that doesn't just affect the men, it actually bleeds directly into the women as well. The women either have to embrace that side of themselves—that aggression, that front-footedness make themselves more male—or they have to pivot all the way to the other side and make themselves ultra feminine to sort of placate themselves, to placate the ultra male environment that they find themselves in. I found that very much when I was working at Morgan Stanley that the women would generally fall into two categories.
Ten years hence, that might not be the same thing, that might not be as true. But I think for a lot of the guys, there's a fragility to that idea of themselves. Behind that really turbocharged, steroided-up version of masculinity is a stuntedness, a brokenness, a childishness, and a lack of security about who they are. I think that the most high-octane version of the male experience—the Rishi one, the Eric one, the one that tends towards violence, dominion, and power—is all an armor for something very withered and slightly smaller within them. What do you think, Mick?
MD: I think that’s a really good answer. It’s a kind of masculinity which is very performative and belies a mass amount of childish insecurity. They're all acting as if it’s the way that men should act, should behave because they've grown up in a place where a certain type of masculinity has the best currency. It’s brash, fronted-footed, [and] toxic in many ways. That's the way they'd been taught to behave through their career at Pierpoint. They’re also having some sort of come-to-Jesus moment about it, whether it’s been the right path to follow. Their lives have not been incredibly positive through behavior like that.
The thing Diana says—I don't even remember what the line is—but being there for your children, for your people that expect your love, like all that is a lot harder to do than to have the brash, front-footedness of being a man at Pierpoint. It takes work to do that, and it takes putting yourself like last and your family first. It's much easier to push it all away and revert to the Pierpoint type.