This story contains spoilers for the Industry season three finale.
The otherwise heart-pounding Industry season three finale both begins and ends with moments of transcendental calm for our main lad Robert Spearing, played by Harry Lawtey. The young working class banker at Pierpoint has long been the show’s primary masochist. He’s thrown under the bus at work, he’s toyed with in an oftentimes evil will-they-or-won’t-they relationship with resident heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela). But the Rob we see opening and closing the Industry finale is different: he’s out of his stiff banking clothes, he’s grown out his hair, and he’s making a tantalizing sell for his psychedelics startup. In the very last moments—after he’s been dealt one final betrayal by Yasmin—he perhaps teases more big things to come for Rob in Industry season four: “Listen, I’m just here to give you an opportunity—join us on the ground floor of what is going to be a spectacular journey.” (We’re in.)
Ahead of the finale, Harry Lawtey spoke to us from his home in London, where he was gearing up for a big week. He had recently wrapped filming Mr. Burton, a biopic in which he plays a young Richard Burton. And the Industry season three finale airs just days before the October 4 premiere of Joker: Folie À Deux, starring Lawtey as Gotham district attorney Harvey Dent. Lawtey talked to GQ about Rob’s evolution, what he made of how it all went down between Rob and Yasmin, and acting alongside a familiar Industry face in Joker: Folie À Deux.
GQ: The Industry season three finale both starts and ends with Rob. He looks different, he’s carrying himself in a different way. How were you envisioning Rob 2.0?
Harry Lawtey: Rather than Rob 2.0 for me, I always envisaged it as in many ways the original Rob—a Rob recaptured, to some extent, but hopefully with some important self-growth and revelations that he’s picked up along the way. I identified that scene as an opportunity to display that Robert has recaptured the essence of what made him special in the first place, which was a certain confidence and boyish charisma and a warmth that it feels as though has kind of gradually been robbed along his time at Pierpoint. And for him it feels like an epiphany that he can have his cake and eat it essentially. He can still have commercial capitalist ambitions, but he’s able to operate within that system on his own terms and do these things ethically and try to strive forwards in a way that aligns with his own values. Ultimately, over the course of the three seasons, we’ve seen him become really disenfranchised with Pierpoint as an institution and his place within that. He realized how completely dispensable he was in that ecosystem and also just how little he related to the people and their motivations. Speaking with the writers, we saw it as a bit of a rebirth, to be honest.
That’s interestingly put, and in a way that gets at my next thought: There are a few different possible readings of that last scene. Either Rob has gone over to this new venture and earnestly believes in the mission, or he’s finally become fully cynical and good enough at playing the game to pretend. What was your take?
I think a bit of both. Through the cruel circumstances of season three, he knows now more than ever that it is a game and it is one that you have to play. Ultimately it is about survival and self-interest, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude decency and integrity. I think ultimately the central thesis of the show—for all the characters, really—is and always has been, Can I do the thing I want to do and be the person that I wish to be, and are those two things compatible? In this last episode, Rob maybe realized that that is possible and that involves, like you say, an awareness of the cynicism and the way things work. But that doesn’t mean he can’t believe what he’s selling as well. He’s now going to lead on his own terms, and he’ll be his own kind of flagship really. And whether that lasts and whether that is really practical or possible in the long term, I don’t know, but I think he has to believe that in that moment.
Going off that idea of his evolution: You really see him stand up for himself for maybe the first time this whole series in the previous episode. Where’s that coming from?
It’s sort of the culmination of what he’s been through in the show since the very beginning, but specifically in season three, in the previous weeks leading up to that, he had this kind of quite traumatic legal procedure, thrown to the dogs by Pierpoint. Which I think really shook his foundations and pushed him closer than ever to the point at which he is questioning the entire structure that he serves.
And, ultimately, it’s a question that everyone in the show has to answer for themselves, both in terms of the characters and the actors who play them. Why are we here? Why do we show up every day to this bank that eats away at us and gives very little in return? And he was asking that question more than ever. And, ultimately, arriving at the junction of, I just don’t think I’m made for this. I don’t think I’m cut out for this way of life. So that’s part of what’s freed him emotionally to be able to stand up for himself. And then also you have this really funny, interesting accelerant in that he’s had a hallucinogenic experience and some kind of transcendental journey, and that has just switched some new light bulbs within his brain. It’s brought him a lot of clarity. It’s brought him a warm kind of directness to be able to speak to people that you care about with complete honesty.
He’s always been a very confronting presence for Yasmin, but I think especially now more than ever, he’s able to just ensure the way she’s feeling and speak directly to that and ultimately ask for better from her, which he’s never been able to do. He’s always suffered in a subordinate kind of way to her in that dynamic. And now he’s able to identify her wants and needs a bit more accurately and speak directly to those.
I’m a hopeless romantic, so I think I was always hoping that. But, yeah, it was certainly a shock to me. Me and Marisa had been sort of hypothesizing which way it would go. And ultimately, I think it’s quite telling that she never thought it was going to happen. And I think if there’s one thing we can rely on from [show creators] Mickey [Down] and Konrad [Kay], it’s their cynical approach to the material. That’s in the DNA of the show. It’s in the spirit of the show. There are very few happy endings, but I don’t think it’s necessarily unhappy. It may well be the best thing for them both. There’s an awful lot of love between them and certainly a connection that has transcended way beyond that quite quirky sort of sexual dynamic that they had at the start. It now has a foundation of real substance, but they’re a dysfunctional pair and they don’t necessarily make each other happy every day.
