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This story contains spoilers for Industry season four episode seven, “Points of Emphasis”.
Two patches of underarm sweat are starting to bloom on Sir Henry Muck’s pale blue shirt. The mid-afternoon sun is drifting through the windows, and inside the glass cube of his office he is starting to cook. As he waits for his colleague Whitney Halberstram to enter and deliver judgement, he has the hangdog thousand-yard stare of a prince whose fiefdom is crumbling. Whitney walks across the corridor from his own office and opens the door. The handle comes off.
“Oh fuck,” says Mickey Down, as a production assistant rushes forward to reattach it.
It is mid-July and we’re standing in a facsimile of a Canary Wharf skyscraper office on the ground floor of an aircraft hangar-sized set at Wolf Studios in Cardiff, Wales. Behind a few carefully-placed indoor office plants, Down and his Industry co-creator, Konrad Kay, are watching the action on a pair of monitors. Beyond this corridor, extras in pink and white Tender polo shirts are milling around the open-plan office beneath a neon sign that reads YOUR FUTURE IS A MOUNTAIN. Nearby, a group of men in suits stand with furrowed brows. For a moment they look like HBO execs making sure nothing is running over budget, until the costume department starts winding their five-figure watches for the next shot.
The cast and crew are in the final three weeks of filming Industry’s fourth season, and the intensity of what they have been making since March can be felt on set. Kit Harington, who plays Henry, arrived today joking that it had taken him three days to learn two lines of complex dialogue, looking exhausted from living the boom-bust rhythms of Muck’s life. Today they are shooting a pair of pivotal scenes from season four’s breakneck penultimate episode, “Points of Emphasis.” A perfect encapsulation of the show’s kaleidoscopic approach to storytelling, it features a marital implosion, an underhanded boardroom vote, a threatening encounter in a shadowy parking garage, and a moment of distilled euphoria on the dance floor of a crowded nightclub.
In the previous episode, Henry learns he has been betrayed by Whitney (Max Minghella), who reminds Henry in a letter (hauntingly voiced over by Minghella throughout the episode) that, as CEO, Henry is implicated in the fraudulent activity that underpins Tender. In episode seven, Henry tries and fails to come to terms with his third extremely public downfall in a row. “It’s dramatic, isn’t it? Set someone up like that, and then smash them down,” Kay says, of his and Down’s decision to publicly flog Henry yet again. “When he fails in government and fails at Lumi, it’s a spiritual failure. It’s a failure of his station. It’s like the most embarrassing thing that he could possibly do given what he’s been afforded.”
Down and Kay, who co-created the series after their own failed careers in banking, have directed four of the eight episodes this season, including this one and the finale next week. On set in the summer, with the cast of the show dressed in expensive but low-key business casual, Down (in Issey Miyake pleated trousers and a Industry merch baseball cap that reads SternTao) and Kay (in a blue Palace fleece vest and a silver Rolex), look like the starriest people on set.
This season is their biggest swing yet; they shot more of it on location than ever before, jetting to Durban, South Africa for the episode that followed Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) and Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh) around Accra. The sets are bigger, too. At the end of season three, Pierpoint & Co. was sold off to the Egyptian sovereign wealth fund Al-Mi’raj and the Pierpoint trading-floor set, which stood at Wolf Studios for more than six years, was torn down.
The Tender office set we’re sitting in represents a new area of inquiry for the show: the world of fintech start-ups. Production designer Simon Rogers looked at fintech offices in London for inspiration, initially using the floorplan for the skyscraper One Canada Square before realizing it wouldn’t fit in the Cardiff space. The glass and sliding doors in the Tender office are designed to give the impression of endless reflections and deflections. People are not who they say they are; something is always being hidden. Harsher materials, like backlit metal mesh panels, are meant to give the caged environment of the office an “edge of danger,” says Rogers. “Like, if you bash into a wall it might cut you.”
Walking me through the office he flicks through an iPad of visual references for the show: images from films like Eyes Wide Shut and Dark Waters; a tightly-framed speeding-car shot from Phantom Thread; and photos of The Dover, a 70s-vibe Mayfair restaurant where the lighting is sex-dungeon low and the nine martinis on the menu all brush the £20 mark.
The accoutrements in Henry Muck’s executive corner office—including a complicated Italian coffee machine that looks like it could administer a lobotomy, and a hunk of rock fashioned into a penholder—look like the carefully chosen objects of a boy pretending to be a man. Today Harington’s Muck wears a blue shirt from British brand Beaufort & Blake, a blazer from Italian menswear label 40 Colori, and shoes from Crockett & Jones, who’ve been making footwear in Northampton, England since 1879. “The English upper classes don’t like shiny things. They like things to be muted,” says costume designer Laura Smith. “So cufflinks are woven knots, not bright things that draw attention. Nothing that’s gauche.”
At his desk, Harington is hunched over, as though Henry has been winded by Whitney’s entrance into his office. This is the first time they’ve seen each other since Henry opened Whitney’s letter. “I feel like I’m in the room with a reptile,” Henry says as his partner pulls up a chair. By this point in the season Henry Muck is in freefall, and Harington manages to plumb new depths of despair in a character whose season has already included a near suicide atttempt. Earlier Harington had told me modestly that Mingella was doing all the heavy lifting today, but on the monitor you can see Harington internally combusting. He screws his eyes tightly shut, hangs his head in his hands and says “Fuck yourself” with the energy of the air going out of a balloon. When “cut” is called after one take, he stretches his jaw to wet his mouth.
“In Henry’s mind, when he fails as a politician, that’s one too many, and so we find him at the bottom of a spiral. He is dragged out of that funk and, although on shaky ground, thinks, ‘Well it won’t happen again, this is my redemption! Finally, my hero’s journey will come good,’” Harington later told me. “But this time he’s been conned and left holding the grenade. He got sober but his privilege blinkers stayed on. I do find it hard not to feel sorry for him.”
At the monitors, Down and Kay watch with the zeal of fans, giving small, fast nods like dogs on a dashboard as scenes unfold, and raising shaking fists in the air when a take lands. “Maybe put some deodorant on if you have some,” Mingella improvises as a throwaway barb to Henry before walking out the office. It doesn’t make it into the episode, but earns a good laugh.
After blowing up their show’s spiritual home and scattering characters to the wind at the end of season three, Down says, Industry’s creators decided a “soft reboot of the show” was in order. He and Kay, who co-wrote six of this season’s eight episodes, had a few starting points for where to go next. “We knew we wanted to write something in the vein of a conspiracy thriller with this enigmatic figure at the center of it,” Down says. “These financial start-ups are headed by people who have made the company in their image. So we needed a master storyteller at the center of it.”
Whitney Halberstram, who shares a surname with a character many readers believe to be Patrick Bateman’s alter ego in American Psycho, is just that master storyteller—a con-man who keeps spinning new stories even when he’s caught. In episode seven he drops phrases like “necessary balance sheet imagination” and "a misalignment between the velocity of my vision and the velocity of regulation" as Henry tells him to call it what it is: fraud. In the script, a bit of direction summarizes how his fantasies are received: “Henry looks at Whitney like he’s mentally ill.”
“There was a great line that Joseph Charlton, who’s one of our writers, came up with, which is, ‘The difference between an entrepreneur and a criminal is success,’” Down says. “Whitney begins his life as an entrepreneur and he makes this mistake at the start of his career which he thinks he’s going to be able to outrun.”
Down says they found it “cosmically satisfying” to cast the son of Anthony Minghella—the late, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter of The Talented Mr. Ripley—as Whitney, whose talents for deceit and manipulation links him to Tom Ripley and many other great con-men and fraudsters of literature. Whenever they wrote a scene featuring Whitney, they made sure he was telling the people he was playing exactly what they needed to hear. When Whitney first hones in on Henry in episode two he is at a nadir—in the depths of drug relapse, sitting in the dark at the piano of his ancestral home. Whitney spots a mark. “That first seduction of Henry is all about taking this broken man and saying, ‘By the way, you’re just telling the wrong story about the facts of your life,’” says Kay.
On set, Minghella plays Whitney with brief glimpses of madness, improvising sudden outbursts, like when he barks “Henry, look at me” at Harington during one take. When I spoke to him months later, he described the process as “blackout acting,” explaining that he would go into every scene open to whatever might happen. “It was kind of scary, because I didn’t watch the monitor at any point,” Minghella says. “I had no idea, really, what Whitney was like until I watched it.” Minghella couldn’t find much of himself in the character but found himself focusing on Whitney’s impatience. He is often checking his watch, hurrying people along, trying to avoid standing still enough to be caught.
Later that afternoon, after a break for lunch (scampi and fries are the most popular option on this particular day), the cast are called back for a boardroom vote scene. Henry and Whitney sit at either end of a table inside a large glass box in the middle of the office. Most of Minghella’s more explosive takes will not make it into the finished episode; Down and Kay will opt to show him in control, retaining his sense of ultimate unknowability. One emphatic moment does make it in: Minghella slamming his hand on the table as he says, “‘Fuck’s sake, Henry. Tell them how passionately you lobbied me for this as our fearless leader and CEO.” It’s a performance for the crowd, delivered with no flicker of real emotion behind his eyes.
Down, who’s watching the monitors with Kay inside a meeting room next to the office reception area, calls out “You’re killing it, Max.” This scene is Henry making good on Whitney’s request to “believe in us, one more time.” But the Tender board isn’t buying it. After an early take, Down and Kay pull back the sliding office doors and call for “More energy!”, like footballers pumping up a home crowd.
In the scene, one of the suits spits out a stuttering request for the men in the room to “stop sidestepping substantive questioning.” (“Go on!” says Kay, when the actor lands it.) Whitney’s response to this outburst is a withering “Cool” that cracks them both up every time. “I think what was most important to me was that he had a sense of humor and a wit,” Minghella says of Whitney. “I didn’t have to be a generous or a kind wit, but, y’know—bullies can be funny.”
Later in the episode, while trying to make a run for it, Whitney is bundled into the back of a van in a New York car park and the grander scheme he’s tied up in is revealed. Turns out his Tender deputy Ferdinand (Nico Rogner) is in fact giving him his orders—on behalf of a shadowy surveillance operation that wants to harvest the data Tender has access to. It’s the show’s most conspiracy-thrillerish moment yet, showing the influence that films like Michael Clayton had on the creation of this season. “You think up to that point that Whitney is the villain that’s been driving all this stuff. Then you realize actually that he’s at the mercy of someone else,” says Down. “There’s a follow-the-money approach we have when we write Industry. It starts from, like, graduates on the trading floor and it goes all the way up to state-sponsored espionage, which is real. Hopefully we’ll be sending people to Wikipedia.”
Minghella found something tragically funny about how Whitney is suddenly and brutally cut down to size in that scene. “Obviously it’s an HBO show and you’re supposed to always look sexy, but I didn’t feel that Whitney felt that way. It was important to me how he deteriorates, and how small he looks when he gets out of the car. It’s sort of pathetic, and I thought that was very funny,” he said. “I also had some kind of physical outburst that was completely not planned and ended up hurting my hand quite badly.”
The fourth season of Industry goes there, and then some. Episodes often unravel like a bad dream. In episode four, journalist James Dycker (Charlie Heaton), Rishi (Sagar Radia), and a closing-time hanger-on embark on a wild drug binge that leads to Dycker’s sudden death and Rishi jumping from a balcony and breaking both his ankles. It reminded me of the reporter Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker story about a teenage boy, caught up in London’s nefarious dark money circles, who jumped from a fifth-floor balcony to his death on the shallow bed of the Thames.
The end of episode seven features a comparatively innocent night of partying; coming near the end of a season in which the show has morphed into a dark thriller, it arrives like a postcard from a simpler time. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Harper (Myha’la) go out to “blow things away” together in a club sequence where they dance with their arms and mouths pressed against each other on a throbbing dancefloor. Later, the camera tracks them through the crowd’s legs to the railings of the smoking area where they are collapsed together in ecstasy as Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” plays. “We’re here forever,” says Yasmin. “Even if we can’t be.”
The scene was shot a few days earlier in a nightclub in Cardiff, and there’s still a charge of excitement lingering on set about what they captured that day. “The construction of the season is a sort of rollercoaster, when you think about it. It’s at the top of the track at this point and we have to give that to the viewer,” says Kay, meaning before it comes hurtling down in the final episode. “It felt like, with where they end up, you wanted to give them that release.”
There is no release for Henry, who is left holding a ringing phone. Yasmin has sold him out to his uncle, Lord Norton, who’s preparing to run a devastating Tender story on the front page of the newspaper he owns. Henry cannot find Yasmin at home and arrives at the office to be informed she resigned that afternoon. This betrayal, which runs parallel to Muck’s betrayal by Whitney, Down says, is in motion from the moment Henry “crosses the Rubicon in his marriage in the first scene,” because there are “echoes of her father in the way that he speaks to her, which she can no longer ignore.”
“In Henry’s entirely self-centered head, she is an amazing chapter in the story of Henry Muck. And he ends up being a tragic chapter in the story of Yasmin Kara-Hanani, I think,” said Harington. “We thought a lot about how this season, Whitney is daddy to Henry and Yasmin is mummy. Both mummy and daddy throw him under the bus to save themselves.”
Still, Down and Kay find it hard not to root for Henry a little, as one of the very few characters in the show who actually wants to make society better, even if it is out of some sort of twisted sense of noblesse oblige. Even Minghella saw a way into Whitney through how he empathized with Henry.
“I found Henry deeply relatable to where I was at in my life at the time. He’s a stunted person, the same age as me, and I think of myself as quite a stunted person,” Minghella told me. “The affection that Whitney feels for Henry, whether it’s entirely authentic or not, was something that I found easy to play because it felt like I was trying to be sympathetic to myself.”
In the last episode of Industry season four, reality arrives like a bad comedown, particularly for Henry. “He’s finally given consequences at the end of episode seven, which I think he’s expecting, and kind of enjoys in a very weird way,” says Down.
Harington saw the end of episode seven, with his character under fire, a little more defiantly: “For a guy like Henry, it’s time to press every nuclear button there is.”