Konrad Kay &
Mickey Down

EO

In “Smoke and Mirrors,” Robert, played by Harry Lawtey, is asked by Sir Henry, played by Kit Harington, to do basic math on the spot. “You can’t multiply that in your head? What’d you study at Oxford?” Sir Henry asks. “I studied geography,” Robert replies. It’s genius. The line maps the absurdity of how higher education funnels into finance—and how professionalism itself becomes performance. Can you walk me through the process of conceptualizing Industry?

MD

The show has developed and evolved massively from where we first started. Our references came from a number of different places. Konrad and I obviously worked in finance. We met at Oxford. Some of that is the DNA of the show, especially in the first season, when the characters lacked power and were coming into a job for the first time. It was about the experience of going into your first job totally green and being the most junior person in the room.

Obviously, there are slice-of-life shows, but lots of them are set in New York—not that many in London. Industry is a show we wanted to make set in London, about ambitious people, in a way that there weren’t shows like that before. The characters on those kinds of shows are often millennial caricatures of, “I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know what I want for my life,” with really no intentionality around their own existence. We wanted to make something more directed that reflected the intensity of what we’d experienced.

EO

What were you both working on before getting into the minutiae of building the show?

MD

Konrad and I had made a micro-budget feature film called Gregor. It was the first time we directed something we’d written, because we had to make it ourselves. We raised the money on Kickstarter in eight days. It was a very different beast from Industry, but it shared some DNA. It was about an ambitious guy in a place where his ambition was misplaced—someone who wanted to get up and go. We thought, “Okay, well, there’s something interesting in that. A character who actually wants something from their life rather than just sitting on the sofa, smoking weed, and complaining about life.”

EO

Where did the original impulse for the show come from?

MD

Lena Dunham’s Girls was a massive inspiration for the kind of rawness and honesty depicted in our characters. It’s funny that Lena ended up directing the first episode of Industry, because she came to us. We really responded to her as a creator. We knew we wanted the superstructure of the show to be the workplace. As we continued to evolve the concept, the workplace became one of the most important characters in the show.

Konrad and I knew we could write this show because we understand this environment. We understand the minutiae of it—how people talk, the specificities and idiosyncrasies of the finance world. We also know firsthand what it’s like to be a young person in London and wanted to mesh those two things together. The first thing we wrote together was set in finance. It was called Not An Exit, which is a super-pretentious title, kind of a nod to Barra Notice. As a commercial title, it didn’t work because no one understood what it was. [Laughs.] We had other ideas that were even more avant-garde—“White Elephant,” The City, Square Mile—and versions with “banking” or “finance” in them that we were running away from as fast as we could. We didn’t want people to immediately think, “Oh, it’s a young banking show… It’s ‘Young Wall Street’ or something.” [Laughs.]

We chose Industry because it was inoffensive yet informative. When we were pitching, we originally suggested “The Industry,” but our collaborators didn’t like it. When we came back with just Industry, they were into it because it was one word and felt universal. That universality has helped the show’s development. Everyone thinks of their respective field as “the industry.” Whether you work in art, fashion, film, or finance, it carries the same charge. Even if you don’t work in finance, if you’re in any cutthroat business with young people trying to break in, you can project your own experience onto it. In the third season, which is on now, the show expands beyond finance into tech, politics, and media more prominently.

EO

How did Lena technically get involved?

MD

We’d written four episodes and had been greenlit by HBO. This was the start of 2019, and we were trying to find directors. Every time we sent a name HBO’s way, they were like, “Okay, this person’s quite interesting, but…” [Laughs.] We had the sense they already had an idea of who they wanted. Lena has a first-look deal with HBO. She read the first four episodes and really responded to them. She said, “I don’t know anything about finance, but there’s something in this that I responded to.”

So she came to London and met with us. She told us, “I was in your position once, being given a show at a particularly young age. But I had Judd Apatow. I’ll be your mentor figure in this.” She was also very clear: “I want to be a director. I don’t want to overpower the show or be in charge of it. I don’t want to be a showrunner. I’m just going to direct an episode and get on with it.” Which is exactly what she ended up doing. We’re massive fans of hers—and still are.

EO

On one level, you’re creating a new framework for dialogue for our generation while also introducing a new young ensemble cast. When did it feel like the show had legs?

MD

The development of the first season was us trying to figure out what the show actually was. We knew it was both a workplace drama and a slice-of-life show—even though those things can feel contradictory. Was it super dramatic? Funny? Self-serious? Traumatic? All of those qualities, which feel cohesive now in season three, were kind of in tension in the first cuts of season one. We opened with a death, which set the tone immediately. And we were like, “Well, how are we going to make something that lands on its feet—that’s fun and entertaining—when all of this drama happens in the first episode?”

The episodes were initially 58 minutes long. We cut them down to 45, which gave them a relentless pace. We had an incredible music supervisor, Oliver White, and a great composer in Nathan Micay. The atmosphere they created really carried us through that first season because, if we’re being honest, there isn’t huge plot development. The characterization and setting are interesting, the idiosyncrasies feel sharp—but season one is mostly a vibe. It had an energy that made us think it worked. In season two, we probably overcorrected. We had a ten-week writers’ room. We wanted to prove—to HBO and to ourselves—that we could do eight hours of serialized storytelling. In the process, some of what felt fresh in season one got smoothed out in service of getting the structure right. I think it’s in season three that we’ve finally pushed everything together. To answer your question about when it felt like the show had legs—obviously, it’s running. But I still think it could run faster. [Laughs.]

EO

Konrad, you worked in banking longer. The show needs to be hyper-specific in order to really work—to be believable. While these characters operate in finance, it’s compelling that the series also shows how these industries overlap and inform one another—how finance bleeds into art, culture, and ultimately politics.

KK

I’m sure there are people watching season three who feel the show is fundamentally different from what they signed up for in season one. On some level, it is a different show. Initially, we were almost too wedded to the authenticity of our experience. We were clinging to a documentary-style reality, which—by the time the show aired—had already been complicated by faster editing, bold sci-fi music, and a kind of Michael Mann tonal palette. When you go back and watch that first season, what’s actually on the floor is quite low-stakes, well-observed material about how people interact in a real workplace. The stakes were small, but they were realistic.

I think we had a fear of losing that naturalism, but also a fear of writing about bigger, more ambitious things. For me and Mickey, the lens was small because we didn’t quite trust that we could write about everything that genuinely interested us—and execute it in a way that was digestible, non-didactic, and entertaining. Our ambition grew as we kept getting renewed. We started asking, “Why can’t we tell a story that’s a little soapier, a little more entertaining, without betraying what’s true about the show—that it’s character-driven?”

It’s not like we sit around trying to editorialize. But writing a season takes six months before we even film it, and we want to feel like we’re biting off more than we can chew—that it’s invigorating, different, a challenge, a bar that has to be cleared. With season three, we were lucky to get another renewal. We had eight hours. We’d been working on the show for five years. So we thought: let’s throw everything at the wall. Let’s link the trading floor to British high society, media, tech. Let’s burn through every idea we have. It became a challenge to ourselves—how far have you come? Can you actually pull this off?

EO

It’s wild how season three centers a yacht storyline. Jonathan Bloomer, the former chairman of Morgan Stanley, just died in a yacht disaster off Sicily. The parallels are eerie. Have you seen it?

KK

Yeah, it’s crazy.

MD

It’s very odd. A lot of people have sent it our way. It’s horrific, obviously — a horrible tragedy. It does feel weirdly similar to our storyline. [Laughs.]

EO

You guys are in your early 30s now?

MD

Mid. I think firmly in our 30s. [Laughs.]

EO

Do you feel the show is catching up to your life now, or does it feel like it’s happening in real time?

MD

The characters aren’t as old as us, but they’re becoming more accomplished than we ever were. We were never accomplished in the financial industry. I crashed and burned after a year and a bit. Maybe they’re where we thought we’d be if we’d stayed in. Actually, no—they’re far more competent than we ever were. I don’t know. I’d say the seasons reflect more of mine and Konrad’s ambition, our style, our temperament.

Season one—we were in our late twenties when we wrote it—is very rough around the edges. It’s silly in some respects, slightly too self-serious, maybe even a bit arrogant. There was a kind of, “We don’t give a fuck about the rules of writing a TV show. We can just do whatever we want over eight hours.” In some respects that works really well. In others, it makes me cringe because it feels almost YA. Maybe that’s what some people liked about it. Watching it back now, there’s a charm to it that I didn’t really see when we were making season two. We wrote season two during COVID—it’s set during COVID—and that specter hangs over it massively.

EO

The show doesn’t seem anchored to a fixed timeline. How contemporary do you want it to feel?

MD

It’s not set in a specific timeline. There are references to 2024 this season, and it’s meant to feel contemporary. Some of the storylines reflect what’s happening in finance—and, as we said, apparently even in the world of yachting disasters. But ultimately, it reflects what the world feels like to us at a given moment.

Season one had this energy of, “fuck, we’re doing this for the first time,” and we imbued the characters with that because we were doing it for the first time. It was scary. There was a lot of pressure. It didn’t go right all the time. But we made something cobbled together that was, in its own way, a success. Season two was us trying to be serious and professional—and what we got was something much more serious and professional. By season three, we didn’t know whether we’d get a fourth season. So we thought: let’s throw everything at the wall and write about what we actually like writing about. A lot of that comes from contemporary life. We wanted it to feel like London in 2024, and for the characters to reflect that. When you write anything, so much of it comes down to tone—what you find funny, what’s orbiting your real life. It’s hard not to write about the things in the real world that affect you.

EO

Are you developing other projects in tandem, or were there other projects before this?

MD

There were other projects. The way development works in the UK—or at least how it worked at the time—is that you develop a lot of things simultaneously because there aren’t writers’ rooms in the same way. So you sell loads of ideas for not that much money to different production companies, and you end up writing a lot at once. It’s slightly chaotic.

It got to a point where we were really focusing on two projects. One of them was for Cinemax—a period drama about a Black female highwaywoman in Regency England. It was very pulpy, almost comic-book or graphic-novel in tone. It was really fun, but that was what we were doing right before we sold Industry. Once Industry started moving, we put all our eggs in that basket. We were like, “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to have to fucking find other jobs,” because we pushed everything else to one side to focus on it.

EO

How old were you when the show got picked up?

MD

I was 29. We’ve only ever made Industry. We delivered the show in February or March, and it came out in August. These past few months have been the first time we haven’t been working on it every single day. Normally we move straight from development to writing to production to post. Then the show comes out, we start developing the next season, it gets picked up, and we go straight back into writing and production again. We’ve been doing that cycle for six years now.

This has been the first real pause—a chance to think about other things. We’ve started kicking around movie ideas, doing rewrites for other people’s films, and working on new TV concepts. It’s been nice to go somewhere else creatively, flex a different muscle, and then come back to the Industry universe.

EO

Across a few different projects, it seems like you’ve consistently centered female leads. Why is that?

KK

Cynically, at the start of our career, we just thought it was a more interesting way of getting things made, to be perfectly honest.

EO

In what sense?

KK

As two male writers, if we could write strong female protagonists, culturally that was something selling quite well at the time. With Industry, we’re dealing with a hyper-masculine workspace. To us, the stories that hadn’t really been told in that space centered a female experience inside those hyper-toxic environments. When I went to Morgan Stanley, a lot of my female friends had stories you just wouldn’t believe. This was slightly pre–MeToo. It felt like an original way of exploring territory people thought they already knew well. The lens typically used to depict that world has been old, white, and male. So we thought it would be a subversive way to tell the story—one that would still feel organic.

I was always interested in how women navigated their own femininity in those spaces. Speaking in very broad strokes, what I noticed was that women would often become either hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine. They would either toughen themselves up and become one of the boys, or become a kind of object of desire for the boys. That’s reductive, obviously. But in terms of how I saw successful women operate in that world, those were the archetypes that seemed to emerge.

EO

Is this something you explicitly reflect on in the writing process?

KK

Well, we never lived through those experiences thinking, “This would make good TV fodder.” It was more that when we came to make the show, part of the excitement for HBO and Bad Wolf was that we’d actually lived through this world to some degree. That became one of the USPs of the show—that it wasn’t just speculation.

I think the press has probably overdone how autobiographical the series is, especially in the first two seasons. The easy narrative was, “These two guys met at university, worked in a bank—now they’ve made a show about it.” [Laughs.] That’s the cleanest hook. And that’s not to say there wasn’t more to say about the show. I just think the world can feel intimidating. The jargon is dense. The tone is hard to place. So instead, they wrote about mine and Mickey’s biography, because that was the sexiest entry point at the time. But the level of autobiography in the show has definitely been overstated.

EO

What has the show revealed to you as you approach writing for an ensemble cast? Or does it feel strongest when you lean into more character-driven episodes?

MD

I was actually thinking about this the other day—whether, if we were to do more seasons, we’d have more single-character-focused episodes. We struggled to do that in season one, when we were trying to set the stall of what the show is about and what this place actually is. The show works in, I think, a number of different ways. It can be a business drama that gives you some insight into that kind of world. It can be a character study about certain characters—strivers and outsiders. It can feel like a slice-of-life show about living in London. I think it can feel like a very frenetic, fast-paced, almost quasi–action film in some respects.

What directing the last two episodes revealed to me is that the show can actually be quite romantic—not melodramatic—but it can wear its heart on its sleeve in a way I didn’t think it could before. I thought we were writing about a really cold world full of very cold people, working very hard and very fast in service of money, and that meant there was no room for romance in it. When actually there can be quite a lot of romance. And what we uncovered in directing—especially that last episode—is that the show can have an emotional heart, which I didn’t think was there as much as it probably should have been for us.

KK

I think the experience of the first two seasons has sort of taught us how to write it, in the sense that we didn’t really know what the show was in season one. As Mickey said, we found a very fast editing style because we were scared we didn’t have enough material, and that wedded us to it. Then we’d go back and almost diagnostically ask, “Which episodes worked best?” And we’d say, “Episode four of season one was probably the strongest.” So that kind of became the rubric for how we wrote season two. We were like, “Everything needs to have a very clear story structure. Something needs to go wrong in the first ten minutes. Everybody needs an obstacle to overcome.” That’s basic screenwriting structure thinking.

The show functions very well when it feels like everything is in a constant state of emergency. It helps us write it. It helps the characters play it, and it makes for a compelling, visceral viewing experience. A lot of season three plays like there’s a fire alarm going off somewhere and all the characters are having to man the pump.

MD

I think the reason that this last episode (S3, E2) is good is because it’s not that. Otherwise, the show could run the risk of being repetitive. We’ve done so many episodes where it’s a ticking clock. I think the surprising thing about the last episode is that it breaks away from that formula. That’s not to say that in future episodes we’re not going to use that formula again, because it is very successful. But I think we proved to ourselves that the show can actually switch modes and still be successful, even when it feels very different.

KK

Dynamism is basically all we care about. We just want the show to feel engaging, moment to moment.

EO

What does it feel like writing that chaos?

KK

It’s way more boring than it sounds.

MD

It’s almost mathematical. As Konrad said, there are things that have to happen in the first ten minutes to set the tone for the rest of the episode. We have to lay the groundwork for some sort of challenge to our characters that will either be resolved or left open-ended by the end. That’s just writing a TV show.

The writers’ room is not chaotic at all. Everyone’s very funny and dynamic, and anything can go—people say what’s on their mind. We all mine our own experiences and it’s a great creative arena, but we’re very rigid about what we need structurally. We were much more chaotic in the way we approached writing season one, and that manifested in the literal making of a chaotic season.

EO

What changed for season three?

MD

We were more professional. We finally knew how to run a writers’ room, and we had much more intention about what we wanted. We didn’t know what the show was in season one—we were still figuring it out—and thankfully we were given the opportunity to do that on an HBO budget for three seasons. Now we think we know what it is. But that said, we’re going into season four. Maybe the show will evolve again and be totally different. That’s kind of the beauty of it.

KK

The whole thing has felt like an evolution, and the challenge of season four will be to keep pushing ourselves beyond the bar of the previous season. We want to make the show feel like something else again—something new entirely—and that’s part of the fun. It’s also what scares us. It has to feel like a challenge.

EO

Did you approach this last season like a film? Or are you still thinking in terms of television?

KK

No—it’s TV. It’s episodic. Every episode works as a complete story. We have huge reverence for the fact that we’re making a TV show, not a film. If we wanted to make a film, we’d make a film. They’re totally different mediums.