Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are taking inspiration from Tony Gilroy for the upcoming fourth season of the HBO series.
“We want to write a corporate thriller,” Down teased to an audience during a Deadline x HBO FYC event at The Times Center in New York City on Wednesday night. He said they’re looking to Gilroy’s Michael Clayton for guidance, joking that he “felt quite bad” meeting the director recently and admitting their plan, “when he directed and wrote the greatest corporate thriller of all time.”
As for whether their version will stack up, Down added: “You have to tell us in … not that long, actually, because we’re doing it very quickly this time.”
Down and Kay joined stars Myha’la, Marisa Abela, Harry Lawtey, Ken Leung and Sagar Radia following a screening of the Season 3 finale for the conversation on all things Industry.
Scroll down to watch a video of the panel.
After trucking along as what Bad Wolf producer Jane Tranter endearingly referred to as “The Little Engine That Could” for two seasons, the third installment blew the doors open on the modest series about a group of young and hungry investment bankers.
HBO signaled its confidence in Season 3 early on by moving the series to its marquee Sunday night primetime slot, which paid off in spades as Industry began to bring in its largest audiences ever. The third season has made several “Best of 2024” lists and, for the first time, it seemed inevitable when HBO renewed it for Season 4 in September, ahead of the explosive final two episodes of the season.
“Having been so in love with this show for almost coming on six years now, having other people fall in love with it in the way that I feel like I’ve been in love with it for so long has been such a blessing,” Myha’la said. “So many of us, this is our first big project, and it meant the world, and it ended up changing our lives. So to celebrate it in this way, to the scope that we have, has just been really cool and validating and special.”
Ken Leung and Marissa Abelo
Matt Doyle for Deadline
Myha’la Herrold, Konrad Kay, and Mickey Down
Matt Doyle for Deadline
Harry Lawtey and Sagar Radia
Matt Doyle for Deadline
What started in Season 1 as a bit of an autobiographical (the creators began their careers as investment bankers themselves), character-driven story, which Kay described as a “slice of life show under the guise of a workplace drama in a very specific place with a very specific language,” became bigger and more ambitious with Season 3 as the world expanded beyond the confines of the trading floor at the London offices of Pierpoint & Co.
“To be honest with you, we couldn’t believe how much story 60 minutes of TV could bear,” Down explained, detailing the “identity crisis” that he and Kay experienced as they tried to figure out exactly what they wanted the show to become over the course of the last three seasons. “We just wanted to make sure that episode-to-episode … it was the most engaging thing we could possibly make. But then, we became braver in our choices about what we were writing about as well. We felt like we could not only write about finance, but we wanted to write about the intersection of finance and politics and media and make it feel lived in and real, but also super entertaining.”
Season 3 also takes some big swings stylistically and tonally, which kept the audiences and the actors on their feet with the realization that we’ve yet to see all that Kay and Down can do with this story.
The Season 3 finale, titled “Infinite Largesse,” in some ways serves as a catalyst more than an ending, catapulting the series to even greater heights.
All of the characters will have plenty to contend with in the impending fourth season, perhaps most of all Radia’s Rishi, who certainly draws the short end of the stick, so to speak, with his violent and traumatic final moments in Season 3.
“I think the great thing about that scene is that it’s not in turn with the show at all, so therefore the shock factor is sort of tenfold … it wasn’t anything that I anticipated was going to happen,” he said. As for where Rishi goes from here, he jokes that’s “above my pay grade” but thinks the options are endless, as Rishi can either finally atone for his sins, or he could dig himself an even deeper hole.
Giving Rishi the opportunity to clean up his act might be the kind thing to do, but Down and Kay didn’t get into this business to craft a docile narrative. “My instinct as a nice person, obviously, is to give Rishi a nice ending, but my instinct as a writer of Industry is to give Rishi a slightly less nice ending,” laughed Down.
Not only are questions swirling about how each character will forge ahead, but also how their relationships with each other are going to withstand (or not) the duress they were put under in Season 3. Abela’s Yasmin, in particular, is at a bit of a crossroads with two former allies: Lawtey’s Rob and Myha’la’s Harper.
Feeling betrayed by Harper and doing the betraying herself when it comes to Rob, Yasmin has built up an armor by the end of Season 3 that puts her in a position to be “the hardest version of her” in Season 4, Abela mused.
“I think that the only people that know Yasmin … the real Yasmin, are the audience now, and that’s just a really exciting place to be,” she added.
Whatever is coming for these characters, the creators agree they’re excited by the idea of pushing the boundaries of what Industry can be.
“Someone told us that we’re one of the few TV shows ever to successfully jump the shark,” laughed Kay, indicating that’s the energy they’ll continue to bring moving forward.