Mickey Down and Konrad Kay don’t make the same show twice.
The duo launched their series “Industry” with a relatively quiet start, occupying the Monday night slot on HBO in 2020 during the pandemic. Back then, the show focused on a group of young graduates hoping to get full-time positions at an investment bank, navigating a world filled with sex, drugs and power. The story got bigger when they came back in 2022, and even bigger when they returned in 2024, now in HBO’s coveted Sunday night slot.
But that season ended with the central investment bank, Pierpoint, closing the doors on its London office. So Down, Kay and their writers’ room made things bigger again, this time without a building to contain them. In lieu of the trading floor, “Industry” Season 4 enters a world of politics, financial journalism and international espionage. It also sets the stage in a drastic way for a fifth and final season.
“Season 4, we were like, well, if we weren’t doing ‘Industry,’ can we see if we can strap a sort of propulsive thriller engine into the world we’ve created and make the rules slightly different? Make it character-driven, but also make it a proper insider story, a whistleblower story, an investigative journalism story, a con man story,” Kay told TheWrap. “These are just things that me and Mickey find cool in stuff that we’ve watched in our cultural dialogue over 20 years.”
You can read our abridged interview with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, below:
Every season, it feels like you guys are making a different show. I’ve heard you describe this season as your “Michael Clayton” of the “Industry” universe.
Kay: We love that movie, and ever since we gave the press that quote, I’ve come to hate that movie. *laughs* We should have just never said it because they’re comparing us to such a great conspiracy thriller, and Tony Gilroy’s a big hero of ours. It’s made everything be refracted through that quote. To be fair, we did have it on the writers’ room wall as an inspiration for the season.
Going into Season 5, me and Mickey are being really careful with ourselves to not compare it to anything — to not really talk about it, to be honest. We’re excited to keep the majority of the surprises under our hats and we’ve found that we don’t want to write ourselves into a corner genre-wise or perception-wise.
Down: Season 1, we were interested in young people getting after it, having sex and taking drugs, whatever young people do, and how you push up against hierarchy in an institution. That was kind of born out of our experiences. Honestly, as we’ve grown and we’ve read and we’ve just been part of the culture and the world as it is today, it’s impossible to write the show without feeding off that culture. I’ll speak for myself, I’m incredibly interested in politics, especially now given we’re in such an inflection point of where the country and the world are going. To ignore that stuff would feel really insincere.
That’s why it’s always different season to season. We’ll do the same in Season 5. We go into some really weird territories in Season 5, which I think are going to be really exciting for the audience.
It still feels like Season 1 in a way as this coming-of-age story. It’s about these young people who are coming of age in a world that is fundamentally broken. Are you guys doomcasters?
Kay: I think so. *Down laughs* I think Mickey’s definitely more. The thing is, I think being “pessimistic” has become too intellectually easy of a position. I definitely have felt that way for a few years, and I think it’s reflected in the show. Mickey’s had children in the last five years. We’ve both grown older together. Our friendship has matured. I think we’ve both become less cynical and more hopeful really as we’ve written the show.
When we went into the Season 4 writers’ room, we started to think about the endgame for [Yasmin and Harper]. Without getting ahead of ourselves, we were kind of thinking about what the most transformative journey you could take these two people would be on from where you met them in the pilot. But it’s weird. One sort of feels like they’ve always wanted the heart of darkness and then gets the heart of darkness and doesn’t want it anymore, and the other feels like she didn’t really know what she wants and now she feels the pull of what you’re talking about, which is the apogee of transactionality and power and politics and all this really seductive but intrinsically corrupt, corrosive stuff. We feel like they’re constantly orbiting each other, and the way they push in and out of the darkness is kind of how we write the show now.
It’s a longwinded way of saying the show is definitely cynical and pessimistic. Me and Mickey write it with this kind of hope that the show is really about the potential of romance within that space and how healing can exist, but you’re never really going to meet the person who you want to be healed with at the right time for them to be healed. It’s about missed connection. That sense of yearning is something that me and Mickey talk about a lot, something that Nathan [Micay]’s score gave us a lot of the feeling of.
Down: There’s a weird sort of thing happening as we continue to write the show in that it’s hard not to be a pessimist about the world, as Conrad said … but that said, the characters, even though they’re sort of within the system, I feel they’ve revealed themselves, even though they’re doing appalling things, to be more human as seasons continue. It’s easier to understand them, that they’re kind of improvising within a structure that they haven’t made. That’s quite humanizing. As we write the characters more, I feel more hopeful about them and about people in general. It’s a weird dichotomy: The world is awful, but there are people at the center of it that are actually trying to be better.
You made some brave choices with your characters. Eric is seemingly off the board. Rishi is seemingly off the board. Yas has turned into this. Talk to me about making the decision to take these characters in these directions that are extreme or final.
Down: We operate in the writers’ room from a place of organic evolution. We don’t sit in there and say, “Episode 6 is going to be the episode where Eric leaves the show. We just do what feels right for the characters episode by episode, and then we get to Episode 6 and we’re like, “Actually, this feels like his swan song. Coming up against Whitney on CNN feels like the moment where he drops the mic and walks off into the sunset.” So we thought it had to be that. It felt right for the character. That’s sometimes a bit of a conflict, because we love Ken Leung and we love his performance. Eric is in some ways the beating heart of the show, so to make a decision like that, it’s a huge one, and it’s not lost on us that it was a huge decision. But it just felt completely right. That’s how we’ve always done the show.
Kay: To HBO’s credit, for every “Harry Potter” they have and every “House of the Dragon,” there are still shows like “Industry” and like “Euphoria” now where week to week you don’t know what’s going to happen. In a media landscape, I think that’s really fantastic. I actually find I want more and more of that. Even that “Widow’s Bay” show on Apple [this interview was conducted the day Episode 4 aired], I like the idea where there’s a creative voice here and they’ve been given free range to take me on something where my expectations are meant to be subverted because the person telling the story knows the tropes they’re playing with. HBO, they made us work for renewals in the early seasons, but they were never like, “Guys, this is what is working. This is what you should lean into.”
When you guys are looking to write a season of “Industry,” are you setting out to have a Sweetpea episode, a Rishi episode, a Henry episode, or do you just find those organically?
Down: It’s a bit of both, really. Sometimes, the necessities of the plot require a character to do something the audience hasn’t seen them do. There’s going to be a “Ta-da!” moment at some point in the season where they realize Tender is a house of cards. Sweetpea has been the one investigating it, so it makes sense that Sweetpea is the person that uncovers it. That said, we’re also like, It’d be really cool to see Sweetpea traipsing through Accra. The thing we do often is when we have a talent who has been underserved by the show, we throw everything at them.
We want to see under the hood of the character we’ve created. We don’t want her to feel like she’s just there to sort of fill in the gaps of story. We want to know exactly what’s going on in her mind.
You bring some new characters in this season. The big one is Whitney. You give Max so much to do in this season. Talk to me about developing that character and throwing that powder keg into the middle of these other characters.
Kay: We knew that we wanted a big con man at the center of everything, and we were very conscious of the fact that he was going to have to carry a lot of plot and was going to be at the center of this thing. We knew pretty quickly in the process that we wanted it to be about how he seduced Henry and Yasmin, used them. Part of the unlocking of him was that homoerotic relationship he had with Henry. To be honest, we wrote him deliberately for the show at a bit of a remove. He was hyperverbal, hyperarticulate in a way that didn’t really read as fully human.
He came to us like, “Guys, why do you think I can play this part? I’m so intimidated by the level of dialogue.” He won’t mind me saying, he had to carry so much, so many words day to day, he found it very taxing and very challenging. It was a challenging part, but by the end of it he was like, “God, that was so exhilarating. I loved it. I was so nervous day to day, but I know I’m probably never going to get a part like this again in terms of how many words I have to say on screen,” which is probably true.
It felt like harkening back to his “Social Network” days.
Kay: Yeah, definitely, and we were hyperconscious of that as well.
This show, when it started, felt very much like it was about Harper and Yasmin, their relationship. As it goes on, it gets bigger and bigger. Now it feels like we’ve gone all the way back to it being about Yas and Harper for this final season. Could you talk to me about setting the stage for Season 5 in that way?
Down: The reason we arrived on them as the central axis of the show was because it was how the show evolved as other characters dropped away. We always were interested in the cosmic battle between Yasmin and Harper and whether their relationship is truly a zero-sum game as one of them posits in Season 1. The other thing is they’re just so f—king good. We want to write them as much as possible. We love writing scenes between them, but we actually don’t have much opportunity to do it because they’re always on different sides of the equation.
Season 5 will really be about trying to navigate a relationship through what we saw them do at the end of Season 4, which was kind of existential. How do they have any kind of relationship after that is the question of Season 5. That relationship can be distant, it can be close, it can be personal, it can be proximity, it can be whatever, but it’s still going to be about their relationship because it always is.
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