As well as showing on the BBC, Industry has been given the coveted Sunday night HBO slot in the US – a mark of status afforded to The Sopranos, Succession and The Last of Us. It has proved a petri dish for its young stars. Marisa Abela (Amy Winehouse in Back to Black), David Jonsson (Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus), and Myha’la (Bodies Bodies Bodies) have made the move to the big screen since the series first aired in 2020.
For its third season, alongside a plot looking at capitalism’s attempts to go ‘green’, Industry tackles the stakes of the class dynamic in the UK. These stakes are existential for the characters, says Down. “There are some people who are just there to pick up the pieces when people who have been afforded a great deal of privilege fuck up,” he says.
“What it has grown into, really, is about the pursuit of ambition in a world where there’s no currency to being vulnerable or having empathy for others. And whether those two things can ever come together. Can you ever find a marriage of those two things in this world?”
The country has just rejected one of the banking industry’s own: a young, hyper-ambitious Goldman Sachs alumni by the name of Rishi Sunak. Yet when most people think about who runs the country, they rarely pay much attention to finance, say the pair.
“The public really underestimate how in thrall and how powerless politicians are in the face of the City,” says Kay.
“Liz Truss was brought down in some part by the invisible hand of the market,” says Down. “It is what it is, it’s a system of power which is not going to change, and politicians think otherwise at their peril, because it’s still as powerful as it ever was.”
In particular, they’ve been struck by the reaction to a scene in episode five showing the chummy quid- pro-quo between politicians, the media, and financiers – with some slating it for portraying an exaggerated “illuminati”.
“That betrays a naivety on their part on how politics really works in this country – honestly – especially under the last five years of this Tory government and the sense it really was trying to eat its own tail,” says Kay. The small number of people with genuine power, he adds, “would really actually freak people out if they knew the true extent.”
“Anyone that’s spent time at The Spectator summer party, or been to members’ clubs in Mayfair, will know it is a pretty realistic depiction of how some government is done,” says Down. Kay chips in: “That doesn’t just waltz out the door when Keir Starmer’s Labour government comes into Downing Street either.”
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