Industry Season 3 Is Dark, Addictive, and Filled With “Beautiful Fuckups”

Last season, you introduced Jesse Bloom as an outside provocateur. This season, it’s Sir Henry Muck. What was the inspiration, and did you have Kit Harrington in mind from the start?

Down: We wanted to show how a bank like this would operate within a real world context, with a company that people can understand. And we wanted to do it through a more cynical lens, like a green energy startup run by this paragon of privilege. We’ve seen the Adam Neumann/Elizabeth Holmes version of a startup CEO, and we tried to think of the British real equivalent of that. They’re always insanely privileged, and then when it gets fucked up, the government’s there to bail them out. But the groundwork’s been laid for success for him, so that when he doesn’t get it I think he feels like an even bigger failure. I think he really has insecurity about his privilege.

Kit plays Muck with such a great mixture of narcissism and vulnerability.

Down: Kit found the vulnerability in someone who is, on paper, really without empathy. A right wing billionaire scion of a family that is probably to blame for many of the bad things that have happened in the last 30 years. And for some reason, I think we empathize with him, because he has obviously had all this trauma. There’s this young, vulnerable child wanting to be loved.

Kay: I think Kit recognized a few things about ambition, but also about the sorts of people that he might have grown up around, and also the sort of people he met post-Thrones. We only spent about 20 minutes in each other’s company before we hired him. He said that in 10 years of Game of Thrones, he never once got to make a joke. He would beg David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] to write him a joke, and they would kind of tease him about the fact that he was so self-serious and honorable. And he’s so funny in this part! The show’s not a comedy, obviously. We were just trying to make sure season three is denser, but also more light on its feet.

We find out that Henry Muck is notorious for his sexual quirks. I couldn’t help wondering if Henry would get along with Kendall Roy, who probably also has a penchant for being peed on.

Down: There’s no doubt, if we expand the universe of these business adjacent shows on HBO, that they would be friends.

Kay: In the real world, 100%.

If you ever feel like doing a crossover Succession/Industry episode at some point, I give you my blessing.

Down: I think Jesse Armstrong might have something to say about that. [Both laugh.] There’s slightly more upside for us.

Yasmin’s journey this season from debauched socialite to embezzler heiress is extremely dark. Can you talk a little bit about shooting the yacht scenes that open the first episode and run through the season?