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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THERE’S NOTHING BETTER ON TV’: BEHIND THE SCENES OF INDUSTRY,
THE HIGH-STAKES FINANCE DRAMA THAT HAS EVERYONE HOOKED  
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Rachel Aroesti
January 11, 2026
The Guardian
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_ Created by two uni mates whose last gig was a David Hasselhoff
comedy, the series has become a star-making transatlantic hit. Now
it’s back for an intense fourth season that heads everywhere from
Ghana to Sunderland _

, Illustration: James Dawe/The Guardian

 

* SPOILER ALERT: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS REFERENCES TO MAJOR EVENTS IN
THE PREVIOUS THREE SERIES OF INDUSTRY

Industry is not for everyone. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s drama
about young City bankers is zeitgeisty, iconoclastic and slightly
inaccessible. “It is niche,” says Down. “We don’t write to any
kind of brief. We don’t write what we think is going to be
interesting to other people – or commercial.” For every 10 people
that don’t understand a “reference or the thing we’re trying to
do with the costume or the subtle hint we’re making about
someone’s class, there’ll be one person that gets it. The show’s
for that one person.”

And for that one person, Industry is hard to beat. “Not to toot my
own horn,” says Myha’la, the mononymous 29-year-old who co-stars
as daredevil American trader Harper Stern, “but I think there
isn’t anything better than this show out there right now.”

I – and many others – agree. Since its 2020 debut, the BBC-HBO
co-production has evolved from an intriguingly cool chronicle of
trading floor hierarchies and after-hours hedonism into a
kaleidoscopic and mercilessly entertaining study of money, status and
power in the UK. Along the way it accrued huge acclaim – in 2024,
the New Yorker called it “the most thrilling offering currently on
TV” – and a hardcore cult following (see: feverishly updated
subreddit IndustryOnHBO). Down and Kay have hypothesised that US
viewers – who by series three were numbering 1.6 million per episode
– appreciate its insidery portrait of British society precisely
because they struggle to understand it.

Like all great modern TV shows, Industry is a star-maker. “I don’t
know where I would be without Industry,” says Marisa Abela, who last
year won a Bafta for her astonishing performance as Harper’s
privileged Pierpoint & Co colleague Yasmin Kara-Hanani. Abela, also
29, was cast straight out of drama school and went on to lead Sam
Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic; more recently she featured
alongside Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in Steven
Soderbergh’s spy caper Black Bag. Most of the unknown young actors
who played Industry’s original cohort of graduate bankers are now
making waves in Hollywood, including former cast members David Jonsson
(a Bafta rising star award winner whose credits include Alien:
Romulus) and Harry Lawtey (Joker: Folie à Deux; the upcoming Billion
Dollar Spy alongside Russell Crowe). “I feel like this show is
beloved by our industry,” says Myha’la, who can currently be seen
in Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire. “If I go to LA and take a
bunch of meetings, this is the thing that people talk about.”

With its jaw-droppingly scandalous sex-and-drugs-strewn action and
unusually complex subject matter, the show has given its excellent
cast ample opportunity to prove themselves on screen. Yet, as all true
heads know, the real stars of Industry are behind the scenes.

I meet Kay, who is 37, and Down, 36, on a July evening in a studio
complex on the outskirts of Cardiff, where Industry’s fourth series
is being filmed. The pair – who became friends at Oxford university
and both briefly worked in banking themselves – possess the same
profound self-assurance and jargon-littered conversational style as
many of their characters (Sagar Radia, who plays hilariously crass
trader Rishi Ramdani, describes them as “incredibly intelligent”
and “massively high achievers”). It has been a long day on set –
I’m tired, so they must be exhausted – yet Kay and Down, who is
dressed in Patagonia Industry merch (a special edition just for the
cast and crew, sadly – although you can buy Pierpoint mousemats from
the HBO online store), betray no sign of fatigue when talking up their
next chapter.

Series four, the creators insist, will be more expansive and
electrifying than ever before. Considering the last outing involved
Yasmin witnessing her publishing magnate father drown after throwing
himself off his luxury yacht and Rishi pursuing a lifestyle so
debauched it resulted in his wife’s murder, that’s a big promise.

In some ways, it’s a fresh start. Last time round, Industry lost its
centre of gravity: the London offices of Pierpoint & Co were shuttered
after the bank was sold to Middle-Eastern investors. Kay and Down’s
first job was to ensure their dual protagonists Harper and Yasmin kept
crossing paths; their solution was to introduce a dodgy payment
processing company called Tender, which both women see as their ticket
to establishing themselves in finance’s new wild west (albeit in
vastly different ways).

It’s a setup that allows the show to ricochet between Paris, Ghana,
New York, Sunderland, an Austrian castle and a London council estate,
introduce a host of new cast members (including Max Minghella, Kiernan
Shipka, Charlie Heaton and Toheeb Jimoh) and mull on themes including
fraud, fascism (“the march of populism in Europe” had the pair
wondering which characters “might be drawn to that sort of
philosophy?”), investigative journalism and the current predicament
of the Labour party. “The best version of Industry would be a Tony
Gilroy script directed by Michael Mann,” says Kay, referring to the
writer of Michael Clayton and the Bourne franchise, and the director
of Heat. “And that is what we tried to do in season four.”

As Industry’s popularity ramped up, Kay and Down became figures of
fascination: here were two TV newcomers who had been allowed to make a
wildly ambitious drama for the planet’s most prestigious television
network. Previously, their highest-profile gig had been writing on the
2015 David Hasselhoff TV mockumentary Hoff the Record. How on earth do
you go from that to your own HBO show?

“A massive amount of luck,” admits Down. But also “a lot of it
is grit. A lot of it is schmoozing.” Industry was commissioned at a
time – now gone – when streamers and networks were throwing money
at risky new programming. The pair happened to enter the orbit of
British producer Jane Tranter “at the exact right time; she had this
deal with HBO [to make a show about young people in the City] and
there was an appetite there to do smaller stuff with creators that had
no experience.” Kay and Down are patently well-connected – their
Instagram stories feature them decks-side in Ibiza clubs or on
shooting weekends in the country – yet this apparently wasn’t much
help in the world of television. “I had loads of nepo credentials
when I went into banking,” says Kay. “In TV I had to start at the
bottom of the ladder.”

Kay and Down’s careers may have benefited from the whims of
streaming-era TV, but they buck all its most uninspiring trends: there
are no big-name stars (the only celebrity attached to series one was
Lena Dunham, who directed the first episode) and no existing IP. The
show is so fast-paced and elliptical that you can’t afford to lose
concentration for even a second; this is not background content to
second screen to. While “the hallmark of peak streaming is to take a
one-hour idea and make it an eight-hour idea”, says Kay of the saggy
comedies and bloated dramas that now crowd platforms. “We almost
take an eight-hour idea and make it a one-hour idea.” Industry
offers “a real hit of proper entertainment” at a time when “the
discipline of writing hour-long TV has fallen away”.

Aside from its running time, Industry is hard to categorise. The only
real analogue I can think of is Succession, another HBO show filled
with worldly, machiavellian characters talking shop impenetrably. “I
honestly think they’re nothing alike,” says Kay. “Succession is
like an hour-long sitcom made on a very high production value.” He
uses The Sopranos as an example of the kind of genre-defying TV he
hopes to make. “It’s a familial saga, it’s a crime drama, it’s
a satire of America.” (“I’m not comparing our show to it,” he
clarifies.) Industry is just as stylistically eclectic, and the pair
eagerly reel off classifications that could apply to series four:
neo-period drama, pure satire, slapstick comedy, espionage thriller
and “dry procedural deconstruction of finance regulation in the
UK”, half-jokes Kay.

The pair are clearly uncompromising, but not exactly control freaks.
Before our interview, I observe Kay and Down watching Abela assume the
foetal position on a set resembling an eye-wateringly lavish Paris
hotel suite. Yasmin spent Industry’s third series haunted by her
father’s legacy of abuse and professional malpractice; here she was
listening, masochistically perhaps, to his final voicemail. Sitting
next to each other in director’s chairs, Kay and Down muttered
approvingly about the framing of the shot; how the enormous set of
glass doors resembled a prison or a gilded cage. At one point, Abela
began to question why Yasmin was playing the message on a speaker;
soon she was vociferously challenging Kay and Down on the logic behind
her character’s decision to return to the voicemail in the first
place.

Abela laughs when I remind her of this moment a few months later.
“We did have quite a bit of back and forth. I think I was craving
guidance.” Sometimes, she says, sitting at her kitchen table in a
sweatshirt, the pair will “write a scene and be like: ‘We don’t
really know what this is. We’re excited to see what you think it
is.’ And I’m like, ‘Right …’” Generally, however, this
level of collaboration “is a great thing, they trust me as an
actor”. Radia agrees. “I’ve been on shows before where producers
and writers don’t really want to hear from actors.” Yet with
“the boys” – as he refers to Down and Kay – its “always best
idea wins”.

Aside from replacing Pierpoint, series four’s other major
headscratcher was Rishi. He started life spewing provocative banter in
“deep background”, says Down, a way to give authenticity to the
trading floor (“Get a new suit,” he tells Lawtey’s Robert in the
first episode. “You look like fucking Neo”). Yet Radia’s
impressive performance and flawless comic timing meant that by series
three he’d been given his own intensely disturbing story arc that
melded his addiction-ravaged psyche with themes of fatherhood, money
and class and culminated in his wife being shot in the head by a
disgruntled loan shark (People Just Do Nothing’s Asim Chaudhry).
Writing the character out of this scenario was a “major
challenge”, says Down. “Is he able to repair himself or has he
been broken for ever? That’s his story in season four.”

If Rishi was already beyond redemption, Yasmin is in a more ambiguous
place. Last time we encountered her, she had chosen an essentially
transactional marriage with Sir Henry Muck (Game of Thrones’ Kit
Harington) – a troubled scion of an upper-class family who dabbled
in politics after selling his green energy company – over the
besotted Robert. Now she’s struggling to adjust to
upstairs-downstairs conventions while masterminding her husband’s
next act. Yet her networking gets her into extremely murky moral
territory, and Abela is struggling to empathise with her character for
the first time. “I’ve always said that I completely understand
Yasmin,” she says. Yet “when someone behaves in a way that you
personally couldn’t fathom, you’re obviously working harder to
fathom where that desire is coming from”, she says, expertly dodging
spoilers.

As for Harper, she seems to be in her imperial phase, back in business
as her own boss after bowing and scraping to hedge-fund bosses for
most of series three. Myha’la is enjoying “a return to the jargon;
I was really looking forward to getting my mouth around those words
again.” Sartorially speaking, the costume department used 1990s MP
Martin Bell as inspiration for this new era (I can’t say I could
detect the influence, but it’s nice to know it’s there).

With Robert and Jonsson’s Gus gone, Industry has ended up being
“about two young women in finance. That is not how it was packaged
to the world, or probably to the network either,” says Abela. “It
was a bit of a Trojan horse into finance bros’ living rooms.” In
her experience, female dialogue is “nine times out of 10 the first
thing to go” when time or money runs low on a film or TV set.
“Mickey and Konrad are the opposite of that. They really love
listening to women talk and don’t think for a second that something
has more weight because a man is speaking.”

This keen sense of observation shows: at the heart of Industry is
Yasmin and Harper’s twisted yet bizarrely relatable love story. The
pair “need each other in a really bastardised way, a way that is
really reflective of so many women friendships”, says Myha’la.
There is something classically neat, almost Shakespearean, about their
dynamic of mutual envy. “Harper resents Yasmin’s wealth, her
status, her choice to use her femininity as a weapon,” says
Myha’la. Yasmin, meanwhile, covets Harper’s “gravitas and
capacity to make people hear her when she speaks in a professional
setting”, says Abela.

It is also a show that is incredibly effective at dramatising the
insidiousness of patriarchy, a theme Yasmin’s fancy dress repertoire
(Diana, Marie Antoinette) gestures to. Her fatal flaw is her addiction
to male validation – “a losing battle”, says Abela. She needs
men to adore her and tell her she’s “useful. And when they
don’t, she’s back at ground zero every time.”

This is the foremost tragedy of Industry, although there are plenty of
others: Henry’s childhood trauma and subsequent mental health issues
are the subject of a devastatingly beautiful upcoming episode.

The show is also darkly funny, although it doesn’t quite qualify as
satire. While Industry’s bankers do bad things, this is not an
indictment of their jobs; Kay and Down had little compunction about
working in finance themselves (“the only thing that was ever
grotesque for me was the idea that people could take outside risk and
then lose huge and expect to be bailed out by people who have nothing
to do with that business”, says Kay). In series three, Pierpoint’s
sale negotiations were soundtracked by Rage Against the Machine’s
Bombtrack (“Dispute the suits, I ignite and then watch ’em
burn”). Some believed the show was repurposing the song “to
celebrate capitalism. I think it’s such a reductive reading”, says
Kay. “The show is of course a weird celebration of [these
characters’] lives and the way they choose to live. It’s also a
damning indictment of that business, people who go into it, the way we
structure society, all of that stuff.”

Really, Industry’s most pervasive motif is what happens when the
transactional nature of finance bleeds into everything else. “If you
reduce everything to the quid pro quo of market logic – which is
like: what can I get out of you and what can you get out of me? –
then what happens to your own humanity, your ability to be vulnerable,
to empathise?” says Kay.

Behind the show itself is one such reciprocally beneficial
professional relationship – but Industry is so much more than just
business. Kay and Down are obviously devoted to their brainchild: the
only other project they’ve been connected to, a reboot of swinging
60s TV series The Avengers, is no longer happening, and they instead
seem content to put all their energy into Industry. You can understand
why: the show is their communal mind writ large on screen; the product
of the friendship of a lifetime. “I spend as much time with Mickey
as his wife,” says Kay. “Of course he annoys me. I annoy him. But
what I really love is at the end of the day, I’ll get into a car
with him and still be grateful that it’s just me and him and we can
talk about everything.”

_Series four of Industry is on iPlayer from 12 January, and BBC One,
12 January, 10.35pm._

* Industry
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* financial industry
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