‘Industry’ Star Harry Lawtey Calls This Week’s Episode a “Real Slap in the Face” For Robert Spearing: “He is Just a Pawn”

Industry Season 3 Episode 5 “Company Man” on HBO focuses on poor Robert Spearing ( Harry Lawtey ) discovering that he’s basically been set up to be Pierpoint’s fall guy for the financial and legal catastrophe that was the Lumi launch. However, as the episode carries on, Robert undergoes something of a transformation. Between realizing that he maybe doesn’t want to be the loyal foot soldier for Pierpoint, seeing the depth of corruption ruling banking and politics, and finally embarking on an emotional ayahuasca trip next to Henry Muck ( Kit Harington ), Robert comes out of “Company Man” changed.

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“You know, not to sound too cliche, but it’s certainly a spiritual awakening that happened to him in that episode,” Industry star Harry Lawtey told Decider during a recent chat over Zoom. “But I don’t think that’s entirely substance-induced.”

Sure, the trippy ayahuasca sequence towards the end of the episode sees Robert reckoning with his personal demons, but Lawtey believes that the more jarring experience was “the trauma of that trial.”

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Just when it appears that Rob is locked in a battle for his own survival, without any meaningful help from the company he’s committed his fortunes to, Tory politician Aurore Adekunle (Faith Alabi) takes full accountability. Although she’s seemingly imploded her own political career, Robert learns at a private party later she’s being set up by Lumi CEO Henry Muck’s media mogul uncle and shady godfather to be the next Prime Minister. The whole thing was a farce.

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“It acts as a real slap in the face and it brings him down to earth and really opens his eyes to the structure that he is operating in and his relationship with the corporation that he’s serving and how that facile that is. How it’s almost built on nothing. There’s no real substance to it,” Lawtey said.”And he is just a pawn in a very, very large game that has no real care or respect for him as an individual.”

Lawtey opined that Robert probably could have figured that out earlier if “he had the foresight or self-awareness,” but Industry fans know that younger Robert was not that guy.

“Whereas now, in that very extreme scenario, he has to question of himself, ‘Is any of this worth it? Ultimately, it’s like what is this for? Who am I doing this for? Because I don’t think I’m doing it for me . I feel terrible .'” Lawtey warmly chuckled. “Those are huge questions for him and bless him, he doesn’t respond well to fundamental life choices. But he has no option but to make one at that junction.”

So what happens next? There’s only three episodes left in Industry Season 3 and there’s still unanswered questions about what precisely happened between Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and her shady father Charles Hanani (Adam Levy) on his yacht and how Pierpoint will avoid imminent collapse.

“Yeah, I’m almost glad that he had to sort of go through that experience. It was a reckoning that he had been kind of postponing for a long time,” Lawtey said. “He kind of just gets on with it now.”

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