‘Industry’ Creators on the Wild Season 3 Premiere: ‘It’s a Seismic Change in the Makeup of the Show’

[Editor’s Note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Industry” Season 3 Episode 1, “Il Mattino ha L’Oro Bocca.”]

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Back in June, on a 90-degree day in Austin, TX, a rowdy crowd filed into the Stateside Theater to watch the first episode of “Industry” Season 3 . Given the official HBO release was still two months away, it would’ve been reasonable for fans to expect little of note from what they were about to see. Networks and streamers are extra sensitive to spoilers these days, and it’s easy enough to fill an introductory hour with table-setting. Introduce a few new characters, update viewers on what’s happened in between seasons, remind them where all their returning characters stand, and call it a day. Save the major developments for later. Start slow. Avoid the kind of twists that tend to be shared quickly on social media.

Welp, that didn’t happen. Throwing caution to the wind, the ATX TV Festival’s screening drew gasps and applause from the packed theater, as creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down barely gave them time to breathe. A recurring character dies with little-to-no warning. A series regular gets the axe. A revenge plot starts to take shape. And, oh yeah, Kit Harington shows up.

“We do want it to be super intense,” Kay said during a post-show Q&A.

“Episode 2 is just intense, intense, intense, intense,” Down said. “Episode 3 they go to Switzerland [and take a little break], and then it’s just incredibly intense again.”

Now that everyone has had the chance to see how Season 3 kicks off, Kay and Down spoke to IndieWire about their big swings, from the sudden death of Rob’s (Harry Lawtey) part-time lover and full-time client, Nicole (Sarah Parish), to Eric’s (Ken Leung) seemingly random termination of Kenny (Conor MacNeill), all the way through Harper’s (Myha’la) reemergence as a financial player — and what that might mean for her former employers.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

IndieWire: During your panel at the ATX TV Festival , you mentioned Nicole’s death was one of the first ideas you had for Season 3. What brought that about?

Mickey Down: Look, there are a few different things. There’s the practicality of having something quite interesting and exciting happen in the first episode to a character that we’ve spent so much time with. But it also catalyzed one of the most important arcs of the season, which is Robert’s relationship to death, mortality, his ambition, and the fact that everyone around him just seems to die. Female figures of influence always die around him, which brings back memories of his mom and the trauma he had from the relationship with her. That gets explored further and deeper in subsequent episodes, but it felt like just the perfect place to start him in.

Also, it gives rise to a scene which we love and which kind of encapsulates the whole philosophy of the show, which is: Someone has died in Robert’s life. He has a very weird complex relationship with them. But when she dies, he comes in [to Pierpoint] and does this thing which is so shocking to the people within the show — more shocking than anything that we’ve written: He cries at the desk. It just doesn’t fly in a place like that. It’s showing vulnerability. You’re showing that you’re a human. You are provoking empathy from people, and everyone’s reaction is just to turn around and think, “God, God, God, I hope he doesn’t look at me. I don’t want to make eye contact with him.”

Yasmin and Rob’s relationship is encapsulated in that moment, as well. She could reach out to him, she could take him off the floor, hug him, and say everything’s going to be OK. But in that moment she isn’t equipped to do that because of all the trauma she has. Then Eric takes him off the desk, and you expect him to be horrible because he always is in these situations, but in fact, he’s actually going through his own shit. So he reaches out to him and says, “It’s OK. Things bubble up.” But then he realizes where he is — he realizes he’s standing in Pierpoint, where there’s no currency in vulnerability. So he tells him to stop being a pussy, man up, and go to work. So that sequence from Nicole’s death, as shocking as it is, it only really works because of the aftermath felt in Pierpoint.

When we watched this with an audience at ATX, there was a loud gasp from the crowd as soon as Rob saw her corpse. How did you decide on the way she died? The heart attack, the setting, and what it would look like?

Konrad Kay: The cardiac event was what we always lighted on because it felt realistic to us. Her slipping and bumping her head or Robert knifing her to death would’ve changed the tenor of the show. The gasp was great. It was very gratifying to hear it live because we were like, “OK, it was shocking.” Because so often with this stuff, you’re behind the scenes, you’re watching the makeup [get applied], you’re talking the actor into it — the artifice is everywhere. For it to play the way it played was really important. We got lots of takes weirdly with her eyes closed, and we got one take with her eyes open, and we were like, “Thank fuck we got that take with the eyes open.” It was so much more shocking.

We definitely went for shock value — not in a cynical way. We wanted people to be like, “Woah, my God, they actually went there.” And we wanted it to feel visceral when he pushes her body off. We did a bit of sound design stuff with people hitting bags or dropping bags from a height so that you got the feeling. But we wanted to go [even more] visceral. We wanted to do a prosthetic nose breaking on the concrete, but the pressures of production meant we [couldn’t shoot it].

What you mentioned before, about her being someone Rob loves but who’s also done horrible things, that opens the door for her death to be a little more gratuitous. Whereas if it was a character who was purely beloved, it could feel like too much.

Kay: One of the most upvoted comments on Reddit after Season 2 — sometimes we peruse the comments — was like, “I hope that bitch gets it.” And it had, like, 600 [upvotes]. So there was a little bit of fan service in our heads of maybe this is a character who deserves to bite the dust a little more than anybody else in the show.

Down: I think it works because it’s after a real moment of tenderness, and that’s why it’s complex. She’s bringing him cocoa, they’ve had sex, he’s pinpointed his biggest insecurity around class and validation, and then they fall asleep together under the moon and the stars. He’s wearing her dressing gown! It’s all very weird, fucked up, but maternal and also sexual and there’s a companionship there, and then he wakes up and it’s pissing down rain, and she’s staring at him with blood streaming out of her nose, wide-eyed, having died, and it’s horrific. It is an awful way for him to start his journey of Season 3.

Pivoting from a character who will not be missed on Reddit to one who very much will, let’s talk about Kenny’s firing. As creators, you’ve been willing to fire characters and kill them off. What are those conversations like? Where did the idea with Kenny start, and how do you decide, “Yes, this guy who we’ve built up so much over the first two seasons and that people really seem to like, especially at the end of Season 2, it’s time for him to go.” How did that come about?

Down: That’s exactly the thought process there. First, it reflects a certain degree of churn that these spaces have. You can sit next to someone in a bank and really get to know them, and then suddenly you get an email that says, “I decided to go to UBS,” or “I’ve been fired,” or someone’s box is suddenly gone and they’re gone, too. A lot of the time you never see them again. That’s just how a workplace works. In a cutthroat workplace like this, the churn is just constant. You lose friends, you lose colleagues all the time.

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We always wanted to get rid of someone in the first episode. It was important to have those stakes set very early. The stakes can’t feel fake. If you would set up a character in the first episode [to be fired] — and we had this conversation as well — but type up a new character, do all the work we do with laying the groundwork for them, this person’s going to be a really big part of the season, and then they’re exiled from the show? It just felt like it didn’t have the same oomph or meaning as losing someone that we’ve all learned to love and actually had a bit of redemption arc between seasons.

It’s the sick nature of the show, I guess. He mentions that he got married, he’s sober, everything’s going well for him. There’s no reason for him to be fired — he’s doing well! His biggest indiscretion is that he catches Eric in a very bad moment. Eric comes in thinking, “I’m going to fire Robert probably,” [but] Eric can’t go through with it. He’s back at his desk thinking, “What the fuck am I going to do?” And then Kenny comes and goes, “Oh, I can smell it on you. Do you want to come to another meeting?” And Eric’s insecurities all come flooding back and Kenny is the totem of that. Someone being nice to him is actually the reason why he’s fired. It’s a huge darkening of Eric. So it serves Eric’s character really well, but also, it’s like Nicole’s death. You pinpointed that. It’s a seismic change in the makeup of the show.

Kay: The arbitrariness of it is what I love about it. The moment he becomes more moral, the universe decides to kill him. I just like the thematic resonance of that, that he can try to be a better person, and then the proclivity of one man with power who’s dealing with his own shit gets to banish him from the universe. It felt really true to us on some kind of visceral level. With the writing, we kind of put it on the board at the start, like we want this to happen, and then the psychological depth is figured out in the plotting.

There’s the timing of Kenny’s firing and then there’s his personal bond with Eric, which seems to tie into Yasmin’s moment with Eric where she feels like she can finally talk to him on the same level — like human beings. She seems to feel a little safer because of it, but what we learned from Kenny is the exact opposite. Is that a parallel you wanted to introduce in the premiere?

Down: That’s a really good point. The idea that if you allow someone to see into your soul, it’s actually going to be to your detriment. That’s exactly what he does with Kenny. [Eric] is like, “I allowed this guy in. He knows too much about me now, and he’s reminding me that I’m a human on the trading floor. I have to get rid of him.” Whereas I think the difference between Kenny and Yasmin is that Yasmin is a young woman. Eric has all sorts of weird feelings about his own masculinity which come out later in the season, and at the end of the day, there’s a certain type of male banker from a certain generation who likes the attention and validation that a young woman gives them. That’s the thing that I think for a bit protects Yasmin.

Kay: The show is very interested in hierarchy.

Down: Yeah, there’s a hierarchy element as well. Kenny sees himself as an equal to Eric. Obviously Eric is still his boss, but they’re slightly closer. There’s some camaraderie there. They’ve got a relationship outside of work, whereas Yasmin still is very much in this protégé space. Eric can be like, “I can still mold you. I’m more powerful than you, which means that you’re not really a threat to me.”

Kay: Also, every time someone steps onto the trading floor, they’re performing. [Eric] is performing the role of the boss. Rishi in Episode 4, which you haven’t seen yet, is all about him performing his masculinity and what that means for his life inside and outside [the job] — his willingness to take the risk. Yasmin is playing the role of the protégé or the ingenue when she’s actually not either of those things by Season 3. The bit where Eric and Yasmin are on the couch taking drugs, that therapist falls away and they’re like, “This is us now. And the reason that we’re like this now is because there’s drugs, and when we’re sober again, we’re going to go back into that performance.” The moments when characters are truly real with each other, they both come as an incredible surprise to the characters and make them feel good for a second. But then there seems to be this personal cost down the road of like, “God, I wish I’d never shown you the real me because we’re not friends, we’re not family, we work together and you might use it against me. There might be some leverage in it.” So I think Season 3 is more interested in those two things together.

During the ATX conversation, you mentioned there was a revenge story within the season. Is that a reference to Harper and her relationship with Pierpoint, and, more specifically, Eric?

Down: “Revenge arc” is a big term for it, but that’s the thing that Harper’s grappling with in this season. She does feel resentful toward Pierpoint. She was spat out by it. She gave it everything. Yes, she behaved immorally and probably unethically in points, but I do think she thinks that she was a good asset for the firm. And to be honest, Eric thought that as well. He says in Episode 1 to Yasmin, “I don’t think she’s a good person,” but that’s him just trying to justify his actions in end of Season 2. [In Season 3,] the tension for Harper is like, “How much of my arc is just trying to be successful, and how much of it being successful to the detriment of Pierpoint — and is that going to fuck me up?”

Kay: Maha’la and Ken, after two seasons of the show, they have a very intense onscreen chemistry which people really lock into. Once you know that that’s a power, there’s a creative power in withholding that from the audience and knowing when to deploy it for maximum effect — pulling their screen-time apart and then teasing it. I won’t tell you when they meet, but they don’t meet that many times onscreen throughout the season, and when they do, it’s so electric.

People couldn’t pin down their relationship in Season 1 or 2. They couldn’t work out whether it was adversarial, whether it was a student/teacher, whether it was father/daughter, whether it was Don and Peggy, whether it was sexual, whatever. It was a mishmash of different things. They brought all of that sensitivity and conflict to it, and we just thought, “Well, if we make it purely adversarial it will go off like a firework,” and it feels like it does that as the season wears on.

As a critic, it’s thrilling to watch a show that doesn’t feel like it’s holding anything back. Did you go into this thinking about what to save for a potential fourth or fifth season, or did you put it all on the table and just plan to figure it out when the time comes?

Down: The latter, really. I would love to say that we held stuff back, but with the current landscape and also the way the show is, we’re never guaranteed another season. So we write everything, we use our best ideas, we burn through them. We want people to have satisfied conclusions to seasons, so we always try and write something that could be a series finale, but with the door open enough that it could come back. Without ruining it, you’ll see that there are fireworks at the end of the season.

Kay: [laughs]

Down: A lot of stuff changes, so you can tell us when you’ve seen it whether it feels like the ending. But no, we don’t hold stuff back. Especially this season, we really felt an immense privilege to get a third season when it’s nearly impossible to do that now. So we thought we have to throw everything at the wall and just be as ambitious as we can be.

Kay: Also, we watch a lot of TV and have for over 20 years. So the challenge of, “Can we make every episode feel like it’s the final episode of the season of TV?” that was kind of what was on the writing room wall. Why bother having filler episodes? Let’s just go for it.

“Industry” Season 3 releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.