[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for “Industry” Season 4, Episode 1.]
At the end of Season 3, all signs pointed to “Industry,” if renewed, journeying to the U.S. for Season 4, as two of the three series leads seemed set on moving their business across the Atlantic. In the finale, Harper (Myha’la) discussed setting up her new fund in New York, and Robert (Harry Lawtey) was in Silicon Valley raising money for his psilocybin mushroom venture.
Although it’s added three new American characters — Whitney (Max Minghella), Jonah (Kal Penn), and Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) — Season 4 remains based in the London financial world. On an upcoming episode of the Toolkit podcast, we asked creators Mickey Downs and Konrad Kay whether there had ever been serious discussions about Season 4 going to America.
“There was a discussion. It was a very short discussion with the powers that be,” said Downs. “I could just say the show is a London-based show. It’s about Americans in London. It’s through that lens. But really there’s a financial component, a budgetary constraint component to it.”
New York aside, shooting in London is even too expensive for “Industry.” Since Season 1, the series has shot in Cardiff, Wales, where the combination of tax breaks and lower-than-London costs keeps the production one of HBO’s cheapest Sunday night shows ever — the creators telling IndieWire the production budget went unchanged from Season 1 to 3, even as its popularity grew. Kay and Downs said they long to shoot in New York City and considered doing one episode there for Season 4, but the problem goes beyond practicality and cost.
While the plot is driven by financial deals, which obviously happen on Wall Street as well, “Industry” has always been an exploration of the incestuous world atop British society, with Season 4 digging even deeper into the rigid class system stemming from the aristocracy. Later this season, Harper tells Whitney that he should have stayed in America, where “people don’t care where the money comes from” — a line that gets at the heart of what is distinctly English about the show.
“In the U.K., people really care where [your money’s] from. There’s no sense of social mobility through money there. You can be the richest man, but if you haven’t been to the right school or right university, if you don’t have the right people, you’ll always be middle class or working class, and it’s quite difficult to transcend that,” said Kay. “Whereas in the U.S., as Jonah says to Whitney, ‘Your story starts when you begin telling it.’ In the U.K., your story starts when you’re born.”
Even if the series had traveled across the pond for Season 4, Lawtey’s Robert character would not have been included. At the end of Season 3, the earnest Robert, the son of working-class parents who never found his footing in this world, finally exits London after Yasmin (Marisa Abela) breaks his heart with her calculated decision to marry Henry (Kit Harrington) and join the aristocracy. And, as the final scene of Season 3 clearly indicates, Robert was only going to thrive, professionally and personally, once he got out of the U.K.
“We felt at the time that Robert’s character had come to its natural conclusion,” said Downs. “Because it’s the same as Gus [David Jonson] in Season 2, when characters have found some kind of redemption, they’ve extricated themselves from the world of ‘Industry’ and the operating system which it propagates. They don’t belong in the universe anymore. So then, they go into new pastures in California.”
While that answer would seem to throw cold water on fans’ hope for the return of either Gus or Robert, Downs and Kay haven’t ruled out bringing back Jay Duplass’ Jesse Bloom character, who they teased by mentioning in Season 3 — a trend that continues in Season 4, which Downs jokingly referred to as “edging” the audience. On the podcast, the creators praised Duplass as an actor and recognized he’d become a fan favorite while acknowledging he’s been busy directing, with “Baltimorons” having come out in 2025 and “See You When I See You” set to premiere in two weeks at the Sundance Film Festival.
Season 4 does introduce the three new Americans via Tender — an online payment system used for gambling and pornography sites, which becomes the focal point of Season 4 — with Penn’s Jonah bringing a crass brand of American humor to the season premiere.
“There’s a kind of frat boy humor that we always sort of wanted to put in the show, and we’ve not really been able to because we haven’t had the right mouthpiece for it, a little bit more of a bro-kind-of-humor that [Penn] was the perfect vessel for,” said Kay. Added Downs, “It’s interesting because Kal, himself, is such a sweet, lovely man. Such a cerebral guy, he’s not like that at all. You’re like, ‘Why are you not more like Kumar?’”
It is a distinct brand of American humor, so much so Kay gleefully reports the Season 4 premiere is titled “PayPal of Bukkake” on HBO in the U.S., but simply “Episode 1” in England.
The “Industry” duo indicated they may have had too much fun writing Penn’s dialogue, as Minghella —who plays Whitney, Jonah’s best friend and right-hand man at Tender — smartly requested some of the lines be transferred to his character, the more cerebral and polished of the pair.
“We loved writing Jonah’s character, we were giving him so much to say and so much to do that Max was like, ‘Can I just have a little bit of this as well?’ His voice is so clear on the page, and you want to know what Whitney believes,” said Downs. Kay elaborated, “The scene where their characters are introduced and they’re talking about jerking off, we rewrote that scene very close to shooting because Max was like, ‘I want to understand what this guy’s sense of humor is like, I want to understand a little bit about his actual humanity’ before we go into [what] he called ‘full sociopath.’”
[Spoiler ahead for “Industry” Season 4, Episode 1.]
Kay, of course, is referencing Whitney turning on Jonah by ousting him from his own company. That surprise conclusion to the Season 4 premiere leaves audiences able to start seeing the shape of the conspiracy mystery-thriller surrounding Tender, which will become the focal point of the season.
“We’re big fans of conspiracy thrillers, big fans of Michael Mann movies,” said Kay. “We were like, ‘What would this show look like if you knew the characters, you were embedded with them, you had history with them, and then we strapped them to a thriller engine?’ That was the Season 4 story. It was can we put all the pieces on the chessboard? Give something that week-to-week had the watchability of those great movies.”
While on the podcast, Kay and Downs pointed to Mann’s “The Insider” being a direct influence on this season, along with Alan Pakula’s ’70s conspiracy thrillers (“All the President’s Men,” “The Parallax View,” and “Klute”), “Michael Clayton,” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” But the Season 4 premiere had a distinctly HBO influence, as the co-creators felt the need to figure out how to bolster the Jonah and Whitney friendship-business partnership, before pulling the rug out from underneath the audience.
“The reference we kept going back to really was ‘How to Make It in America,’ which is a long-forgotten HBO show about two friends starting a business. You needed to feel like you [were] invested in their friendship for that ending,” said Kay. Added Downs, “You have to believe they have the sort of relationship me and Konrad have, which is they’ve been joined at the hip, professionally, personally, they’re best friends, they came up together. You might want to watch this season, thinking the whole season’s going be about their friendship, you’re going to have to root for them, and then you’re crushed at the end when one fires the other.”
“Industry” Season 4, Episode 2 airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, January 18.
To hear Kay and Downs’ full interview on March 1, after the season finale, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
