In the fourth season of HBO’s Industry, Harper (Myha’la) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) have moved up to new places and even more cutthroat competition. Things have become increasingly complicated for Yasmin and Henry (Kit Harington) as his fortunes have changed, and the arrival of Whitney (Max Minghella), a high-powered executive with a grand plan for his business threatens to bring them both down as they continue to play with fire.
Awards Buzz spoke with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who serve as creators, writers, and executive producers for the show. They discussed whether they ever considered having Minghella use his real accent given the strong emphasis on distinction between Americans and Brits:
“He’s played Americans on screen. We had a scene in episode eight which we cut where he actually switches to a British accent, and watching him do that on camera was really disorientating because we’re so used to him playing Americans, but he was perfect. Me and Mickey did think about his identity a little bit because obviously he’s got fluent parentage, he grew up in the States. He was in the UK and then he was in the States. He’s a transplant. The fluidity of his identity was useful to us in terms of us building the character, and we talked about that with him. He was always going to be American in our heads. I suppose the class system in the UK and US is so different. To have made him a UK character, the con would’ve been much harder to sustain here in London than it would’ve been necessarily in the US. This whole idea of total change might have been a bit difficult. We just cast him because we thought he was a strong, unknowable, inscrutable presence, and also that there was a magnetism, but also a weird softness, boyishness, vulnerability that we just found attractive for the character.”
Adding so many new cast members in season four wasn’t always easy, and they had a go-to answer for the most challenging one to find:
“Charlie Heaton’s role, Jim. That was quite tricky. We saw a lot of people for it, because he’s a character that doesn’t really naturally fit into our world, a character from a different socioeconomic background, different class background, obviously incredibly ambitious. Also, we wanted a quite authentic rendering of a journalist. It felt like it was not in our wheelhouse, so to speak, so we saw quite a few people for it and Charlie was a last-minute find. He obviously spoke about the character incredibly intelligently. He read for it, which we always love, especially an actor of his stature and caliber reading for a role is great. I think he was attracted to it the same way Kiernan Shipka was attracted to her character, that it was just such a departure for them as actors. It was so far away from what they’d been doing for the majority of their career. It was thrilling for them, and it was thrilling to see them do it as well. I think it was the scene that is Dycker’s undoing at the end of episode four that really hooked Charlie as well because he was like, fuck, well, I’ve never done something like this before on screen and this is kind of exciting.”
Watch the video above to hear how they feel about this show continue to fly under the radar four seasons in and what it’s like to finally write with an ending in mind ahead of the upcoming fifth and final season.
The first four seasons of Industry are available to stream on HBO Max.
