‘Industry’s Creators and Star Want You to Be Scandalized

This fall HBO is showing you a side of the finance world you’ve never seen before. From first time creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay comes Industry, an addicting drama about a group of new recruits competing against each other for jobs at the prestigious investment bank Pierpoint & Co.

Though this new series is solidly rooted in the complex world of finance, it’s immediately accessible to everyone. That’s because Down and Kay intentionally centered their story around the wide-eyed newbies in this complicated world. Adding to Industry‘s immediately relatable premise is its fresh-faced cast, which is almost entirely composed of little known actors.

And though the HBO drama is a work of fiction, it was inspired by Down and Kay’s real lives. After the duo graduated college they took jobs in the financial industry. That’s what the creative team first wrote together, a script about the world of finance. “It was a really, really bad script. Baggy, over-long, had really long scenes in it,” Down recalled. “But it showed that we could sit in a room and have a really good time.”

Once Down and Kay started working with Industry‘s production company Bad Wolf, they figured out how to fix their script. Rather than making the project revolve around the typical bigwigs who appear in banking dramas, they adjusted it to focus on their past perspectives as newbies in this world. “That’s the key that unlocked the whole thing,” Down said. “Up to that point, me and Konrad had been obsessed with writing a London-based relationship drama about people in their early-to-mid 20s. It allowed us to do those two things at the same time.”

“We were really interested in the micropolitics of a workplace,” Kay added. “That doesn’t really speak to finance. It speaks to any kind of job that you have. The question that the show is really interested in is: Who has power in a workplace? Who has a right to power? Whose relationship to power in their past will make them have a weirder relationship to power in their present?”

Framing Industry around a group of people new to this world even trickled down to the series’ casting. “I think all of the main young adult cast had only ever done bits and pieces, things here and there. Nothing to this scale, and certainly not with the kind of responsibility of carrying a series,” star Myha’la Herrold recalled.

Herrold plays Harper, the drama’s central antihero who is desperate to rise to the top no matter what it costs her.

“We were sort of mirroring our characters. We were like, suddenly: plop! Here you go! Do this thing. Just like Harper and Yasmin and Robert and Gus were all doing. There’s definitely this deer in headlights, imposter syndrome thing going on. That was just how we were feeling,” Herrold added.

It’s not merely Industry’s focus on its scrappy underdogs that makes this series so addicting; it’s Harper herself. As a biracial, American woman without a college degree, there’s nothing about Harper that fits into the cookie cutter world of London finance. Watching her excel even as everything is stacked against her is a deeply gratifying experience.

“We really wanted to make sure that, across all the characters, that on some level they were genuine outsiders,” Kay explained. “Weirdly, Mickey and I actually talked about Barry Lyndon a lot, the Stanley Kubrick film. This idea that some people are born into a certain social class. Through Harper, and obviously through Robert as well, who’s working class, we wanted to see how much of that stuff you couldn’t ever leave behind, even in a more rarefied world.”

Down described Harper as “a character who has quite an interesting relationship with the truth, shall we say. Who lies quite easily, who maybe is a bit of a grifter. Usually that character is not a biracial, young Black woman from upstate New York.”

“Rather than your Walter White or your Don Draper it was important for us, as writers, to have a young biracial woman who is as complicated, as contradictory, sometimes as ugly, sometimes as empathetic as all of those characters,” Kay added. “We really wanted her to behave in a way that those great TV characters would, which was never really knowing where you stood with her.”

To make Harper feel as authentic as possible, Down and Kay relied on Herrold’s input into her character. “When I first got to sit down with Mickey and Konrad, they were like, ‘Listen, we can only write so much. We don’t know what it’s like to be a mixed woman from America. So please bring as much of yourself to this as you can and are willing to do,'” Herrold recalled. “Particularly with lingo, the way it’s written is not necessarily how I would speak. Anytime I was like, ‘Yo, I’m gonna spit like this. I’m gonna say this,’ they were like, ‘Good, go.’ I felt really honored and privileged that I got to be an integral part of the crafting of this human being.”

Though Herrold admits that her onscreen persona distorts the truth more than she does in real life, she feels close to her character. So much so that when this reporter described Harper as “hungry,” Herrold showed off her own tattoo that read “Hunger.”

“I’ve had this since 2017, I think. Sophomore-ish in college,” Herrold said. “It’s kind of crazy. They covered this for Harper, which I was like, ‘Damn.’ Because this is so her.”

Herrold noted that she would never do what Harper does to get ahead, which includes selling out her co-workers and using video sex to help buy a forged college degree. But she does understand Harper. “I know that in an alternate universe, I would be that bitch. That would be me… which makes it very easy for me to be like, ‘Yeah, I know how she did this,'” Herrold said.

As any antihero, Harper’s character is packed with moral qualms. But one complicated part of the series Herrold had no problem approaching was Harper’s many steamy sex scenes. “I love sex and sexuality and how it plays a massive role in us as human beings. Sex is a huge part of my life. I try to allow myself to have sexuality be involved in everything I do, because I feel like it really fucks a person up when you separate those things,” Herrold said.

For the actor it was important that Industry‘s many steamy scenes look real and feel narratively meaningful. That was a direction the series’ intimacy coordinator and director of Industry’s first episode, Lena Dunham, helped cement. The first time Herrold went back and watched one of her filmed sex scenes, she remembers getting emotional.

“I was like, ‘Wow. This looks like real sex. I’m glad that we got this.’ Also, watching Black love in all its complexity and weirdness was so rewarding to me,” Herrold said about an Episode 5 scene. “I was just really proud of it and really excited and grateful to be a part of the integration of sex and sexuality in its realness, and its complexity, and its ugliness on screen.”

Industry‘s sexual complexity was always important to its creators. “We wanted the scenes to be, for want of a better word, quite hot and quite real,” Kay explained. “We wanted them to have a heat and intensity that felt like real life, and that felt like these experiences in your 20s. That was really important to us in the way we wrote them.”

“It’s OK, I think, to show two characters enjoying sex, which I don’t see on TV very often anymore,” Down added.

It was also vital to make sure these scenes never seemed gratuitous. Rather, many of these intimate moments are meant to mirror the hunger and desperation of these highly driven young professionals.

“Some of those scenes, they feel almost like in certain situations for certain characters, they’re very distinctly related to their personalities in the workplace, or the type of person they are at work,” Kay said.

For example, in Episode 3 Harper has a one night stand with a guy she meets on a dating app. That moment serves as the release of her pent up anxiety at the office. Another key plot point revolves around the coupled Yasmin (Marisa Abela) sexually taunting her co-worker Robert (Harry Lawtey). In those moments Yasmin is flaunting the control she doesn’t have at work. “Those relationships between the intimate moments and how they reflect their work storylines or how they reflect their own inner-life, me and Mickey thought about that stuff all the time,” Kay explained.

But really Industry‘s creators just want fans to have a good time with their show. “On some level, me and Mickey want this to be a purely entertaining, kinetic, adrenalized, gotta-watch-the-next-episode TV show. Because for us, we love the medium of television. We love episodic storytelling. We wanted to do stuff that really honored that,” Kay said.

“I was going to say something way more childish,” Down joked. “I want them to be able to have a fucking good time. But also, I want them to go away and not stop thinking about it. I want people to talk about it.”

As for whether they’re prepared for a Season 2, that all comes down to their network. “If the HBO people call,” Down said. “You can probably answer better than I can.”

New episodes of Industry premiere on HBO NOW and HBO Max on Mondays at 10/9c p.m.

Watch Industry on HBO NOW and HBO Max