‘Industry’ Season 4 Finale: Yasmin Is Ghislaine Maxwell

I wanted to start with the season’s most explicit theme, which is this idea of perception and narrative and mythmaking that you see everywhere, from Yasmin going into communications to Whitney’s entire deal. As you were headed into this post-Pierpoint version of the show, what drew you to that idea as something to dive into?

Konrad Kay: That, to me, is the core theme of the season. And I’m amazed how few people have picked up on it. It’s not really in any of the discourse. The intersection of Whitney’s identity, entrepreneurship and storytelling was the thing that we kept coming back to. This idea that if he could tell the right story enough times, how much does truth really matter? Eventually you can parlay your way to be bigger and bigger and bigger, so that the core lie at the center of your thing could be almost washed away, right? 

There are lots of real life parallels, but Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos was quite a big one in terms of the idea of, “I don’t have the underlying tech, but it doesn’t matter, because eventually we’re going to talk our way into being a success story.” Whitney is this kind of capitalist avatar. Harper literally calls him a construction. He feels so received. He’s almost like a metatextual character. He’s got all of these little financial things that he’s drawing on that he might have read or might have heard, and obviously everybody’s orbiting him. But to us, he felt like a storyteller constantly telling his own story while also telling the story of his company.

We had a very on-the-nose title for Episode 7 of Season 4, which we got rid of. Before it was called “Points of Emphasis,” it was called “Post Truth.” So to us, Yasmin in that role, how she shapes the narrative of her escape and how the truth doesn’t matter as long as she’s telling the most compelling story— that’s always felt very true of not only the way entrepreneurs operate, but the way politicians operate in the U.S. and the U.K. and all over Europe as well.

Because he’s also an American who’s come to London and fudged his resumé, I took Whitney as a foil to Harper. Was that part of how this character was conceived? 

Mickey Down: It’s not a coincidence. They’re both Americans. That’s why they’re drawn together. I mean, he says that: “I showed you so much for myself, because I saw myself reflected back at me.” He’s honest with her, in a way that he’s not really honest with anyone else until Episode 6 of the season. It’s something that can only really exist outside of the U.K. and particularly in America — the idea of the American Dream, which is your own narrative, your own story, your own myth, in service to the future with no real look into the rear view mirror. It’s how entrepreneurship is built. It’s about what is next, what’s the future. Don’t worry about the sins of the past, mistakes of the past, or background or heritage or whatever. It’s about what is next.

Whereas in the U.K., everything is about the past. Everything is about where you were educated, or who your parents were, or what accent you have. All those things speak for you before you say anything. So someone like Henry can see through Whitney immediately. He can see through him in a way that other people can’t. But in America, your accent, you can sort of shave it down, you can lie about where you come from. It’s a gargantuan country. There are parts of it where people can go missing and disappear. You just can’t do that in the U.K. But for all its class faults, it’s also somewhere where people kind of allow you to have a second chance. Especially if you’re well-connected. I feel like the idea of comeback capitalism and Henry failing upwards, and being able to do it again and again and again, is only something that can really exist in the U.K. 

In terms of your question about storytelling, you have to be able to tell a compelling story, but then you have to incentivize people to believe you. That’s kind of what the season’s about as well. All the people who believe Whitney are incentivized to believe him. They’re all people making money off his idea of what the company is. And they can go like this — [Down sticks his fingers in his ears] lalalalala — when they’re shown the truth of it, as long as they’re making money. That’s why, up until the last episode when the government audit is called, Tender looks like it might succeed. As Whitney said, it’s basically pivoted into this thing which is semi-legitimate. Has real revenue, real income. It has a future which, to his mind, makes up for the sins of his past. And the stock price is still going up! Because even though Harper and her scrappy fund are saying this thing is a fraud, most of the people incentivized to believe that it isn’t are still putting money into it, and still buying it. 

Yasmin’s communication strategy is sort of encompassed in her relationship with Henry. Just sell a lie about yourself. Sell a lie about whatever it is that it takes. Tell the people that you were basically butchered by your trauma. Weaponize that. Weaponize this part of yourself. Leave this little part out. I feel like that stuff just feels very contemporaneous. It feels very true to the world of entrepreneurship, fintech in particular. And it felt like the right direction to push the show in.

I want to get into the finale in a bit. But I think the climax of the season, emotionally, is what happens with Eric in Episode 6, and him walking away. In some ways, Season 3 felt like it could have been the end of that story as well. Why did Season 4 feel like a good point to bring that character’s story some measure of finality?

Down: We’re on record talking about how we thought Season 3 was gonna be the last season. So we kind of threw everything at the wall and gave the audience what we thought was a satisfying conclusion. Then the show got picked up, and it was a creative challenge to write ourselves out of that corner. We had to make good on the fact that we destroyed the precinct. Pierpoint was no more. Loads of the characters had been scattered across the global chessboard. But we also had a conversation with Ken on his last day where he was like, “I think I’m kind of done with this character now.” And we were like, “Well, it feels like we’re done with all the characters. It feels like everyone’s reached a natural endpoint.” 

Then when we got into the writers’ room of Season 4, I thought, Ken is so excellent, and his relationship with Harper was kind of underserved by Season 3. We’ve done every kind of machination of them. We’ve had him be the mentor. We’ve then had them at odds. We also wanted to do this thing, which is like, now that Pierpoint is gone, is the operating software that Pierpoint propagated still infecting our characters? Does it mean that, because they’ve been away from Pierpoint, they’re actually able to form empathetic relationships and show vulnerability? Or is it the system at large that’s making them behave like this? 

Eric has had a little bit of time away. He’s tried leisure. He’s tried work. Both haven’t really edified him, at this point. He’s now going to try actual, proper tutelage of someone. He’s actually going to be a patron to someone. He’s actually going to give someone the experience that he’s accrued. And he’s going to try and progress as a person and evolve. Then what we see is that people resort to the default sometimes. I feel like most people don’t have these kinds of conversions and change character. The only character who’s really had that is Kenny [a former Pierpoint banker played by Conor MacNeill]. And we’ve stuck to that. There’s always a question in the writing, which is, are we going to reverse Kenny’s sobriety? We kind of think it’s the one part of the show that feels hopeful, even though he’s been fired from Goldman Sachs and ends up at DeutscheBank, which is the worst, according to the show. 

But Ken’s character, it was a way to emotionally rug pull the audience that felt real. We can show him trying to have a relationship with Harper. You can show him trying to be a better person, trying to connect with his children, but then what you realize is that all the stuff that made him the person he was in the first three seasons is still there. It’s trying to get out, and then it just gets out in the most horrible, despicable way possible, which is, again, the hallmark of the show. A character gets their affairs in order emotionally, and then they do the most horrific thing they’ve ever done their entire lives. 

The sendoff that we gave Ken — Eric, should I say — is kind of the most explicit sendoff we’ve ever done with a character. He’s literally walking down the road to nowhere. It was almost us paying respect to the character within what he’d done, which was heinous. And all of this is an intellectualization of the fact that Ken is a phenomenal actor. It just felt weird to come back for a season that was going to be very different, a soft rebuild of the show, and not have him in it. So it was both a practical and creative choice. 

Kay: Also, sometimes in the writers’ room, we just follow our instincts. So it wasn’t like, “We’re gonna write him out here.” It’s like, the kompromat happened. What was his reaction to the kompromat? How would that then function into Harper and his fund? How do you get over that story hump? Or maybe he just walks away. Then when we hit that beat, it wasn’t like, “Oh, the sixth hour in, we’re going to write Ken out.” It just felt very natural. We all got excited by it. That’s what happens sometimes in the room. You can have these sort of best-laid plans for the characters, and then a little bit of narrative changes in an episode, and you go, well, that leads X leads to Y, which means that Z has to happen. And that feels great to everybody, so let’s fucking do it.

I feel like the biggest twist in the finale is that Harper becomes a team player. After you’ve spent so long building this character and establishing how allergic she is to connection and permanence, what made that an interesting place to go?

Kay: Well, very boringly — it’s just narrative growth, isn’t it? Me and Mickey, between Seasons 3 and 4, we set ourselves a challenge where we were like — look, this is very reductive, and I’m not saying we took them to psychologically untrue places — but we did set ourselves a target of, imagine you met Harper and Yasmin in Season 1, Episode 1. Harper is a bit of a dead-eyed, ruthless, sociopathic great white shark. And Yasmin is — I’m speaking in really broad terms — afraid of her own shadow, fucking up a salad order on the desk. It would be very cool if you had that image side-by-side with where they end up in Season 4. So, what does that mean? It means it has to be psychologically true, but there also has to be growth. The DNA that you see in the character doesn’t feel like it’s being betrayed, but also they change fundamentally in quite a big way. 

With Harper, that was not mellowing her or softening her, but it was letting a little bit of light into her. What does companionship look like with someone like Kwabena, who’s not necessarily right for her, but what if she opens her heart up to that possibility? What if Sweetpea’s actually a genuine ally who, in a partnership, has qualities that she doesn’t have in herself? She can then, rather than push it away, invite it in. We didn’t want to betray the character, but we also wanted her heart to open up a little bit. And Myha’la wanted that, too. And I think that’s satisfying, in a way, so that when she’s on the plane at the end and Patrick Radden Keefe is like, “People change,” she’s like, “Aren’t they supposed to?” Which is a bit of a cynical play. But when she looks at Kwabena, even if you don’t necessarily think Kwabena is the right guy for her and you don’t ship that relationship, and you can see a million ways that relationship could be wrong, there’s a possibility. There’s a kind of hopefulness to that cut of like, she’s not totally alone for once in her life. You know, the characters are so fucking lonely in the show — we even let them say that in this season, out loud, in dialogue, more than once — that the idea of her building a little island for herself was kind of beautiful to us, even if it meant that Eric couldn’t be part of it.

Down: The show is sort of reductively, but also fundamentally, about the cost of doing business, and the cost of being in this world. That’s explicit in the first episode, when Hari dies for a formatting error. And as we’ve continued to ask the question through the characters: Is this worth it? Is this the price of ambition in this world? We always thought, Would it be interesting if we took Harper on a journey where she begins to question whether what she’s dedicated her life to is actually worthwhile? She’s presented with all these costs in Season 4. Like she says, all the people that I thought were constants have just gone. They have either left me, they’ve been pushed away, or they have been actually physically attacked, in the example of Sweetpea. She starts to feel, to your point about being a team player, she’s put these people in danger for her own self-advancement. And she starts to think, maybe I haven’t been the best boss, I haven’t been the best friend, I haven’t been the best colleague. 

That said, it’s much easier to start questioning the cost of things after you’ve succeeded. She has arrived by the end of the season. She has success. She doesn’t have to argue that she’s worthy anymore. She’s been validated by Patrick Radden Keefe. She now has to sit back and think, “All the things that I’ve neglected in my life, I kind of want to lean into.” I think it’s an interesting place for the character to go, because people are constantly, whether they’re right or wrong, talking about Harper in these sort of sociopathic terms, saying that she’s a liar and she’s a narcissist, and she’s only motivated by self advancement and avarice. All this shit. But I do think that hopefully, in the first three seasons, all that feels like a reaction to having no power. And now, by the end of Season 4, she has power. I feel like the character has to evolve beyond that. Otherwise it becomes a procedural. It becomes a soap. It becomes the same thing over and over again. I’m sure people would want to see Harper just do trading sequences forever. Or they want to see Rishi chat shit in the background forever. But the show has to evolve beyond that.

Turning to Yasmin, there are so many biographical parallels between her and Ghislaine Maxwell — their dads being publishing barons who had fatal accidents on their boats. Given what happens in the finale and where her character goes, it retroactively starts to feel like those seeds have been planted for a long time. How far back had the idea that Yasmin might end up in this place occurred to you?

Down: We talked about Ghislaine Maxwell in the Season 3 writers’ room, and it was more the biographical elements. That story was interesting. We always talked about Robert Maxwell — his fraud, the fact that he named this boat after his daughter. They had a slightly inappropriate relationship. I can’t speak for Ghislaine Maxwell, or understand her motivations whatsoever. But we found certain biographical elements of her story interesting, quite frankly.

But I feel like the one-to-one comp between Ghislaine Maxwell and Yasmin is to do a disservice to Yasmin as a character. Yasmin has been a victim of trauma, a victim of abuse. She can’t really formulate what that abuse was, but there’s definitely a sort of inappropriate relationship with sex and her parentage, which has been there basically since Season 2. The first scene with her father, he’s commenting on her body and how she looks. So that’s always been there. It was never supposed to be a character study about how trauma begets trauma. But as Konrad said, we write what we find interesting. We write organically where we think the character will go. And we started to think about Yasmin’s proximity to power, and what that means, and how that’s a survival mechanism for her — she just gloms onto things in their ascendancy, because she always feels protected by power. That feels really interesting, and that feels like a parallel, I’m sure, with Ghislaine. I can’t speak for her, obviously, but I’m sure that’s one of the things that she was attracted to in Jeffrey Epstein: the fact that she could feel protection.

But Yasmin has always displayed a weird relationship with vulnerable people. She’s a vulnerable person herself. She gravitates to vulnerable people. She gravitated to Robert when he was vulnerable. She gravitates to Harper because she’s vulnerable. But then she, I think, has this sort of unconscious — she feels that she should beget the trauma that she felt when she was vulnerable in other people. That’s the subconscious layer that’s happening within her. Again, that’s probably something Ghislaine Maxwell felt, but I’m not sure. I can’t speak for people who have done these evil things. But I’m sure no one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I’m an evil person.” They feel like their actions are somewhat justifiable, or they can compartmentalize them, and that’s what Yasmin does. She compartmentalizes her actions. She thinks, “Because I felt like this on this day, it doesn’t have a bearing on how I feel at this moment.” As Harper says, she bounces between being a victim and a perpetrator. 

We’re not asking people to defend her. We’re just asking people to see the first four seasons of character development and realize this is probably the natural progression of the character. This is where a character like this would end up. It’s hard to take, because Marisa is such an empathetic performer. There are ride-or-die Yasmin fans who I’m sure are gonna be like, “What the fuck have you done to the character?” But all of this was in her from the very first moment. She’s always been attracted to the vulnerable. She’s always felt vulnerable herself. She’s always felt like whatever’s in the ascendancy is something she should grip onto. And I feel like it would have felt less sincere not to take her there, especially after we took biographical elements from Ghislaine in Season 3. We ask very difficult questions in this show, and we hope that people engage with it. People can be appalled by it, but people can also think that it’s kind of interesting. But the show is a challenging show. It’s always gonna be a challenging show. I really hope that people are challenged by this last episode, but I also think hopefully that the weight of history and the character allows people to at least sort of understand what she’s doing, even if they could be horrified by it. 

The show’s always been topical in certain ways, but this season has felt especially tied to world events. There’s the Labor government coming into power, there’s scandals like the Wirecard fraud, and they’re all incorporated into this fictional world that you guys have built. Is there a balance you guys are working to strike between elements of real life and the fiction that you’re constructing?

Kay: Season 1 versus Season 4, there’s this kind of difference between vérité realism and truth. I feel like we really went for vérité realism in Season 1. Season on season, I think the show has become kind of hyper-real, almost on steroids, look at the capitalist system. It’s late capitalism blown up to operatic, melodramatic proportions, with characters who are bombastic, almost like cancerous growths of the characters that they were before. I don’t think they’re a betrayal of them, but they’re a maximalist expression of who they were. We get through so much plot, we always join the scenes in the most dramatic place. So it feels like the biggest version of itself. 

In that reality that we’ve constructed, it feels natural that me and Mickey go into the horizon. We just pull and rip from everywhere, trying to build our own Frankenstein version of — trying to communicate the feeling of what it is like to be alive right now through the mechanism of the plot, the story and the characters. That’s what we’re trying to communicate. It’s like an incredibly dense, incredibly high velocity of information, incredibly emotional thing that we’re trying to communicate, and I think we’ve succeeded in Season 4. It’s a long-winded way of saying we do draw on real life inspiration. But it’s a hyper-real version of it, and it’s not totally true to life. It’s not like a David Simon version of the Labour government. It’s our version of this superstructure and this massive story that we’re trying to tell, which obviously draws on all kinds of bits of reality. But ultimately, it’s a character drama. Whenever we get into the room, it’s like, Harper and Yasmin, Episode 1, Episode 8, what are they doing? What’s the journey? What are they learning? And the rest of it is the narrative apparatus and the exoskeleton that gets them from A to B.

This interview has been edited and condensed.