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Last we left Industry, the acclaimed HBO series about the London office of an illustrious American bank, the illustrious bank in question had been sold off to a Gulf-state sovereign wealth fund and its principal characters had been scattered to the wind. If the season finale felt like the end of something, that was by design—the culmination of perhaps the first version of the show. “We were trying to basically scorch the earth because we didn’t think we were coming back,” says Industry cocreator Konrad Kay.
When Industry premiered in 2020, it was a worm’s-eye view of the young strivers in London banking, populated by a cast of unknowns. The hook of season one was not just faithfully rendering the stakes of being a bottom-feeder in an industry of note—botching a salad order, showing up to work hungover, striking out with a coworker—but articulating the feeling of being on the precipice…. Of having made it through one door, and then maybe another, and arriving in the arena of real-world action for the first time. Sex, money, work. The semblance of freedom. Like Mad Men before it, the universe, for all intents and purposes, was the office. When Industry first arrived, in the depths of COVID, it had the double effect of showcasing a seductive life outside of lockdown and being consumed by viewers in isolation. In this way, it was like a secret whispered in one’s ear while on drugs in a nightclub. Did this show really exist or did I hallucinate it? The proprietary sensation was an illusion—this was an HBO show. But nobody seemed to be out in the world talking about it with each other.
When Industry returned in 2022, deliciously knowing about how its characters would’ve experienced (and gotten rich off of) COVID, the show started to expand its knowingness to other realms of interest. By season three, Industry was exploding with Things to Say not just about the world of high finance in the UK but of the overlapping sectors of politics, media, and tech (and the subterranean forces of sex, class, money, and power shaping them). The third season’s final episode could’ve served as a satisfying series finale—but there was also a sense that the show had finally reached the point where it could truly be about the stuff it was always secretly most interested in.
“The show was conceived and pitched as the world of the powerful told through the lens of people without power,” says Mickey Down, the show’s other cocreator. “Now, these characters have power.”
When we zoom out from the bank, the show seems to argue in its third season, the picture becomes more complex, but also simpler: British society is controlled by overlapping industries, interests, and players, all of whom find themselves inevitably, and often literally, in the same rooms—usually at a private club in London or a manor house in the countryside—determining the fate of a nation over martinis, cocaine, and hubris.
Our lead characters, whom we met fresh out of university and competing for entry-level positions, are, after five years, now in these rooms, having ascended to privileged positions through talent, ambition, and sex appeal. The show’s central pair, Marisa Abela (Yasmin) and Myha’la (Harper), have grown up with their characters, beginning on Industry right out of drama school—just as their characters begin with the bank right out of university—and shedding their newcomer status in the process. Both actors, each 29, are married now. They are starring in films, fronting fashion campaigns. Though they, like Yasmin and Harper, are now main characters themselves, the wholesale transformation in the show may have only been possible because of Industry’s need to start with a blank canvas.
“I think especially in season one,” Abela says, “the show was not particularly referential to another time. I think it felt thoroughly, thoroughly modern. Every music choice, every location, everything did not feel like we were referencing other TV shows or other things on right now. And I think that gave all of us permission to create characters that did feel new. It wasn’t Yasmin as a mix between this character and that character from this other thing. It was: Have we seen this person before on television? Not really.”
Those initial stakes, when the worst thing that might happen was disappointing one’s boss, now seem like a hazy dream. Because Industry pulled off a magic trick—patiently replacing the components of a show that Kay once told me “couldn’t help but feel YA” in its early-season character constraints with an entirely different kind of show interested in the vast collateral damage caused by individuals playing a much more consequential game.
“Industry is really about people in their 30s now,” Down says. Which is perhaps more familiar territory. “But because you’ve grown up with these characters and you’ve seen them when they were fetching salads and being shouted at by their boss, the character stakes are way higher. Which is a way of saying: This show feels totally different now. But it is still the characters you’ve loved and grown up with.”
Now bolstering Abela, Myha’la, and the rest of the youthful cast are known quantities a half-generation older, actors like Max Minghella and Kit Harington. “I feel so at home in this show,” says Harington, who came to Industry in season three after responding first as a fan. “There was such a distinct, interesting tone to it and a theatricality, which I really liked. The writing was big. It wasn’t minimalist, it wasn’t sparse; it was full. And the combination of the music choices, the style choices, and this young group of actors having this incredible energy. It felt almost a little vampiric of me. I was that young actor on Game of Thrones. And I’m like: ‘Oh, I want that thing that I remember and I love.’ And now I enter as the kind of older actor.”
“There’s just a really exciting kind of thing,” Harington continues, “when you’ve got actors like Marisa or Harry [Lawtey] or Myha’la, and this is all their first job. They’ve come in and there’s a kind of complete freshness to the character they’re bringing because it’s one of their first creations.”
From one season to the next, the substance of Industry evolved too, from something self-referential (the trading floor) to a vastly more ambitious set of ideas and references—mixing, say, Austen with Kubrick, only freshened up for the quarter mark of the 21st century. “I think,” Abela says, “that once you know yourself, you’re able to pull references to other things. All of the stuff in the manor house in season three between Robert, Henry, and Yasmin, it starts to feel like some kind of British love story from the 1800s.” In other words, a show that can be: Pride and Prejudice shot like Barry Lyndon and scored by, say, New Order. Nice. The net effect was that the evolving palette started to appeal to a broader audience.
“I think going outside the bank and seeing lives outside of it has just opened us up,” Myha’la says. “Also: The Kit Harington effect is very strong. It’s not that it’s really becoming more mainstream, but it does have a wider appeal.”
“The show is both popular and not popular at all still, four seasons in, which is kind of crazy,” Kay says.
(Which is also, one might argue, the definition of anything that is actually good.)
When it premiered, Industry was one of the least-watched shows in HBO history. On the verge of season four now, Myha’la says, “We finally hit the numbers where I’m getting, like, ‘Come to Brazil!’ commented on my Instagram. Once you get Brazil—hits different.”
For all the newcomers to Industry in Brazil addicted to the early seasons’ sex, drugs, and techno backbeat, fair warning: Season four is about consequences.
By the end of season three, Yasmin had been fired by the bank, jilted Rob, and gotten engaged to Henry Muck; Harper had gone to work at a new firm with Sweetpea; Rob had left for California; and Rishi’s gambling debts had gotten his wife murdered.
“We blew up the precinct of the show and did certain things to our characters where in effect we scattered them to the wind,” Kay says of the corner they’d painted themselves into between the third and fourth seasons. “So bringing them all back together was a real test of our ability to tell a story—especially in that first hour back.” The realms in which the characters find themselves ultimately reconstituted are like two opposing “teams” on either side of one concern—a fintech company that affects the lives of an immense number of people.
This ambition of the show to move up to a higher altitude and take a wider view of the world below makes the trading floor of the first season look quaint—and might clang for an audience who was there for the will-they-won’t-they of the Yasmin-Robert relationship or the marginal financial gains of a risky trade. Protecting the particulars of the season-four plot as I’m obliged to, let’s just say that there are echoes and inversions of scenes in past seasons—pushed to a much darker place, chickens coming home to roost.
“The show,” Down says, “has evolved from what was essentially a workplace slice-of-life drama about young people having sex and doing drugs in an environment that me and Konrad understood to something that felt a little bit more operatic, soapy. The question for us became: If we weren’t doing season four of Industry, what would we be writing? It would be stuff in the vein of thrillers, financial conspiracy thrillers.”
Walking into the center of that financial-conspiracy--thriller plot this season in as big a way as Kit Harington did in the last is Max Minghella, the world’s most Industry actor who was not yet on Industry. Perfect. Minghella, who comes with a natural unplaceability, plays an alpha American founder fronting a digital payment system that may or may not be cloaking vast illegal commerce related to online vice. Minghella’s Whitney Halberstram is an uncompromising striver of uncertain provenance, whose ambiguous sexuality and uncanny countenance evokes an alien dressed up in the skin suit of a living, breathing human being. He is bizarre, bloodless, and magnetic—masks upon masks upon masks. A powerful enigma.
“It’s an extraordinary character that they’ve written, but also just a massive undertaking,” Minghella says. “I hadn’t done anything, I felt, in my work that indicated I could do it. It’s just a huge thing to take on as a character—like being Iago or something. And so I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to totally fuck it up.”
“Max actually said to us, ‘Why do you think I can do this?’ ” Down says. “And we were like, ‘We don’t know! We just met you! We got a gut feeling that you’ll be great.’ And, look, thank God, because this season would’ve absolutely been a failure otherwise.”
“I think there was something interesting about me, for this character, about the fact that I’m English,” Minghella says, “but I’m only known as an American actor, and that I’d be playing somebody who maybe presents different to who they really are, and maybe there was something already in that misconception of me innately in the world that was something to use.”
Minghella was not an Industry watcher before Down and Kay came calling. “But it was,” he says, “my closest friends’ favorite show.” He caught up quickly, “which is quite an intense show to digest and absorb in a concentrated period of time. The writing is filled with subterranean text and it’s just been a remarkable challenge and pleasure to work on something that asks so much of you. It’s not all the time that happens, especially as an actor.”
Harington describes how the layers of a season of Industry reveal themselves. “You get the scripts, you read them on the page and you go, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s never going to work. I don’t understand a word of it. It’s hard to read.’ Then you get into the read-through and it starts coming alive. You’re like, ‘Okay, now I’m starting to hear it.’ Then you’re learning your lines and you’re going, ‘Oh, I see that bit and that bit links to that bit.’ By the time you get on set, there’s so many layers to it, and actually none of the jargon matters, and all of the subtext is there and you realize those boys have thought it through incredibly carefully.”
“It’s not pandering, it’s not patronizing,” Minghella says. “The ‘pa-’ words don’t apply.”
The show’s relationship to fashion is hilariously mixed. On the one hand, Industry is dripping in stylishness, in specific fashion references, in big beautiful clothes, doing perfect character work.
Miriam Petche—whose character, Sweetpea, is an avatar of the Gen Z creator economy on steroids and introduced to us talking directly to her finance-influencer following about Bottega colorways—speaks for many fans when she pinpoints Yasmin’s trip to Berlin in season two as the moment she knew this show was doing something different with clothes and character. “It was her tracksuit when she got out of the car, and it was so kind of put together and chic, and I was like, Oh, this is telling me a lot about who this person is—maybe far away from what I would wear on a travel day.”
Since go, the show has been catnip for if-you-know-you-know details: perfect references recognizable, first, to those who’ve worked in finance, then more broadly and satisfyingly to those attuned to the intricacies of British class-coded behavior, and, of course, to culture. Music. Film. TV. Fashion.
“We’ve said it from the start,” Down says, “for 10 people who don’t know what the fuck we’re trying to do with a piece of specificity, it’ll be one person who says, ‘I totally get it.’ And it’s for that one person—”
“Because ultimately it’s for us,” says Kay, finishing Down’s sentence, as they often do for each other.
Each actor explains to me their collaboration with esteemed costume designer Laura Smith, who pulls vast references and cultural histories for each character, beyond just clothes—but also, certainly, clothes.
“Laura built a four-piece-suit situation for me this season that serves as Harper’s hero suit that expresses Harper’s dominance,” Myha’la says. “It’s the amalgamation of her whole journey on the show. It begins with: You come from nothing. Season one, you’re wearing hand-me-downs. Season two, you have enough money but you don’t know what you like. Season three, she eventually has enough money and she’s starting to have an identity in the fashion space. And season four, she’s like: No, I know exactly who I am and what I like. I have so much money, I’m going to have it custom-made.”
“I think the actors feel a whole sense of ownership over the characters, down to what they decide to put on their backs,” Down says.
“They’ve grown up, they’ve got money, they’ve got power now,” Kay says. “So they dress themselves in a way that connotes all of that.”
For as fashion-friendly as the show can seem, the vice in Industry makes it difficult for brands to integrate comfortably with the characters who behave badly (all of them).
“All of the jewelry has to come off!” Myha’la explains. For drugs, sex. “Oh, violence, as well. When Harry and Kit were fighting in the ball pit in season three, all their jewelry had to come off, their whatever, their watches, their Omegas.” When Myha’la slapped Marisa in season three. “I had to take my watch off for that too.”
Sagar Radia, who plays Rishi, recalls the journey of the watch he’s wearing in the infamous Rishi-focused episode, “White Mischief.” “For some of the episode, I wore a Rolex, but, I think, as stuff started to get bad, I was no longer allowed to wear the Rolex,” Radia says. “I remember when I had the fitting for season three, saying to costume, like, ‘Man, the show’s obviously that much more popular, really cool brands want to attach themselves.’ And they’re like: They fucking love the show, but they’re trying to figure out how they do it without cocaine all over it.”
Minghella, the son of British filmmaker Anthony Minghella but a longtime Los Angeles resident, who lived his 30s “exclusively in sweatpants” and describes himself as “the least fashionable person on this very fashionable television show,” says the look of his character has little in common with his own tastes. “I would say there’s a JD Vance kind of influence, a little bit. Quite a heavily Republican-coded dress. I find it quite unattractive when it looks like a man has looked in the mirror before he’s left the house. But Whitney is somebody who spends a huge amount of time looking in the mirror before he leaves the house. I had to let go of some of my personal ego because there is a kind of stiffness to him that I find very unattractive. But it’s the character. He’s somebody who’s very vain and obsessed with how he presents himself. But that is how certain people operate.”
When it comes to a character like Kit Harington’s highborn Henry Muck, the clothes are less a question of what than how. “With the upper class in the UK, there are all sorts of hidden rules that signal to someone else that you are part of aristocracy or you are not,” Harington explains, “and they can be things like if you are from Eton, you can wear odd socks, but if you’re from Winchester, you have to wear the same type of socks. Or no one wears new Barbour jackets, it has to be battered, because you wouldn’t buy something new, because that’s showing off, and also it’s nouveau. It shows you haven’t been shooting your whole life. All of these very specific rules in clothing and appearance that signal to someone else that you’re part of the gang or you’re not. If you give away one of those things, it might be ‘Nice to meet you, old chap, but you’re not one of us.’ ”
Laura Smith, the costume designer, is like a Geiger counter for these sorts of intrinsic rules—and it was what instantly drew her to the show first as a viewer. “I think one of the brilliant things they got in season one was when the guys at work are very unkind to Robert about his sartorial choices.” When some more senior coworkers rip the tag off his brand-new suit in the pilot to signal he hasn’t got a clue. “And I’ve seen that play out in real life. And it was very interesting to see it shown like that. It’s something that you learn in the workplace. They don’t teach you that at college. And that way that you’ve had this brilliant education but were completely unprepared for those social mores. And it was a shock to him. Like, Oh, it’s not enough that I’ve aced it at Oxford? I also have to pass through this barrier? And looking at clothes as different types of passports really interests me because it opens the exclusive doors in ways that you don’t necessarily realize until you are in the shoes, in the jacket, and it says in some way that you’ve arrived.”
“Laura is a genius and one of my really close working relationships on the show,” Harington says. “You go in and she’s thought through your character very carefully. She’s done reading, she’ll have books there ready for you on your character and the cultural history that follows him.”
Henry, who entered the world of Industry in season three, comes into considerably greater focus in season four. “In the UK, we’ve all met someone like Henry,” Harington says. “My task, my major objective with him, is how do you make that guy sympathetic? Because that guy, to most of this society, can be a very unsympathetic character, a villainous one. And so the key into that is, Okay, well, take all of your presumptions away from him: What do I feel sorry for him for? I’ve grown to really love him!” Harington chuckles. “When I say I’ve met a guy like that, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t liked them. It’s not that they’re terrible people. There’s just a certain way of looking at the world entrenched into who they are. The British class system is designed to be eternal—and he can’t escape it.”
“I told Laura recently, I’m like, ‘I think I’m dressing like Henry,’ ” Harington says. “I think he’s infected me in my daily life. I’ll shed him. But I like his style.”
The gap between premiering season three and making season four was brief but paradigm shifting. Audiences grew all over the world—sealing the renewal from HBO. Down and Kay wrote the fourth season’s eight episodes quickly and prepared to direct half of the season themselves. Abela won a BAFTA. A fan recognized Petche’s voice in a sauna. Chris Rock shouted out Radia on the streets of SoHo in New York. Harington started getting stopped as Henry Muck instead of Jon Snow…. (Kidding—like the prison of Henry Muck’s birthright, Jon Snow is the fate Kit Harington can’t escape.)
Expectations have had a salutary effect on the show, enabling the creators to expand each time out—and proving the previous season to be a nesting doll encased in a larger one. Now, having scorched the earth, as Kay put it, the creators have opened up the possibility for truly anything in the fourth season.
“I think there are very few pieces of media where you can be genuinely surprised, because either it’s a piece of IP or you already know the road map because of the generic elements it’s playing into,” Kay says. “But I feel like people have no idea what’s coming in season four. Even superfans of it. Me and Mickey sometimes go on the Reddit and there’re like pages and pages of people speculating. None of them are even in the ballpark! And that’s thrilling.”
“It’s just big swing after big swing,” Down says. “And that might provoke a fair bit of criticism as to where the show’s decided to go. But absolutely the criticism will not be that it’s boring.”
Daniel Riley is GQ’s global content development director.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Joe Cruz
Styled by Martin Metcalf
Hair by Nao Kawakami at the Wall Group
Makeup by Bea Sweet using Elemis
Nails by Ami Streets using Nailberry
Tailoring by Lisa Burden and Soraia Samju for Karen Avenell
Set design by Joshua Stovell
Produced by Honor.Agency
