Warning: this article contains spoilers for season three of Industry.
‘Are you going to stop being such a pussy?” asks Eric Tao (Ken Leung) in the third season of HBO finance drama Industry. Eric is a ruthless boss at the London offices of fictional bank Pierpoint & Co. In the season opener, he’s delivering tough love to Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), a young banker whose client (and lover) just died unexpectedly. “Say it with me,” Eric commands. “I’m a man and I’m relentless.” Robert tentatively repeats the phrase, gradually getting louder until both men are screaming together.
Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, the co-creators of Industry, say this exchange epitomises the “turbocharged masculinity” of the trading floors, where they worked in their 20s. “A lot of these men are insecure about their own virility, their own relationships, mortality, their relationship to meaning,” says Kay. “But rather than interrogate these feelings, they’re like: ‘Fuck that, I’m gonna make loads of money, I’m gonna put on my suit, and I’m gonna fuck whoever I want.’”
On the surface, Industry is about money. But scratching deeper, it’s really about class and inter-generational trauma. The “performance of machismo,” as Kay puts it, is central to the show’s exploration of these themes, right down to how the female leads contort themselves to survive. For the men, the currencies they trade in – money, sex, power – are a way of grappling with a central question: what does it mean to be a man?
At Pierpoint, Eric is near the top of the food chain. When the season begins, we learn that his marriage has fallen apart. He neglects his young daughters and uses sex and drugs to careen into a midlife crisis. As his personal life implodes, he becomes even more volatile professionally, firing Kenny, then Yasmin, before finally betraying his boss and mentor, Bill (Trevor White).
Then there’s Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia). Pierpoint’s loudest chauvinist often feels as if he belongs in the 1950s. At the office, he is aggressive and crass – at one point he screams “I am violence!” on the trading floor. In his home life, Rishi is more sensitive: after moving his young family to the countryside, near where his wife, Diana (Emily Barber) grew up, he craves acceptance from the Barbour-clad community. But no matter how many Tory talking-points he recites, the British upper classes have hundreds of subtle ways of letting him know he’s not welcome. Eventually, “work Rishi” appears at home when he smashes the village cricket pavilion – a hut with walls covered in photographs of their old white forefathers – to smithereens.
We also meet Henry Muck (Kit Harington) – an aristocrat and failed CEO of the clean energy company, Lumi. At first, Henry offers protection to Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) after the sudden disappearance of her father amid a decades-long embezzlement and sexual abuse scandal. But Yasmin soon notices similarities between Henry and her sleazy father. When she explains the concept of an unequal power dynamic to him, he scoffs: “Everything’s an abuse of power for me in relationships! I can only fuck down.”
From the outset, there are tensions between Henry and Robert – a working-class northerner who arrived at Pierpoint with the naive delusion that it would be a meritocracy. Their conflict isn’t just about class: it’s about two different visions of masculinity. Robert is tantalised and enraged at the same time by how the “lord in waiting” glides through life. “There are no consequences to anything Henry does,” says Down. “His company collapses and costs the taxpayer billions of pounds, but nothing really changes for him. Living without consequences can be incredibly freeing but in other ways it’s ossifying.”
Henry’s obscene wealth allows him to constantly reinvent himself, but this also stops him from discovering who he really is. Everyone envies him, but he’s lost and miserable. “If your life is constantly consequence-free, it’s barely worth living,” says Kay. “It’s not a proper existence. You’re counting the hours ’til you die.”
Robert has the opposite problem. He can’t stop people from seeing him as weak and expendable. In episode five, when both Pierpoint and Henry conspire to pin Lumi’s multi-billion-pound government bailout on him, he questions whether he really wants to be a “company man” at all. “Masculinity is formed out of the institutions that people choose to mould their identity,” says Down. “Rob is realising that he doesn’t have to be confined by the orthodoxy of Pierpoint. By the end, he’s looking at someone like Eric and thinking: ‘Is that really the apogee of masculinity?’”
The men of Industry treat women terribly. Eric positions himself as a father figure to female employees, before betraying them. He loathes Harper Stern (Myha’la), his former protege, for displaying the ruthlessness he taught her. “You’ve got daddy’s attention now!” he screams as he barges into her office, full of paternal rage. And, when he decides Yasmin doesn’t have the same killer instinct, he loses respect for her and drunkenly harasses her. Kay tells me that, from his own time in banking, Harper and Yasmin represent the two limited options for women in this machismo-fuelled world. “Women tended to bifurcate into people who are trying to replicate the men, or trying to become objects of desire for the men,” he says. “Both of those were pathways to success in a rigid male hierarchy.”
The younger female characters, such as plucky newbie Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche), highlight the mediocrity of men and the institutions that shape them. Sweetpea is the first to realise that Pierpoint is in trouble, comparing working there to arranging “deckchairs on the Titanic”. (Predictably, no one takes her seriously until the iceberg has already hit.) Venetia (Indy Lewis) was even more scathing when she quit, calling Pierpoint a “dictatorship of dying men”.
When Rishi’s wife finally discovers he has racked up £200,000 in gambling debts, she asks him a pertinent question: “Do you know what being a man is?” Suddenly, his armour – fast car, well-paid job in the city, beautiful wife, big house in the country – seems flimsy. She answers her own question: “It’s how you treat the people who expect your love.”
By her logic, the male characters are failing. There is a pattern of controlling behaviour that masquerades as care, such as when Henry’s media magnate uncle, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), takes Yasmin under his wing. He tells her he always knew her father was a “predator”, and that he has the power to kill a tabloid exposé that could ruin her life. But he still won’t help her unless she agrees to marry his nephew. Yasmin eventually capitulates in the end, playing the only card she has left.
Similarly, Rishi won’t let Diana help him with the family finances, then plunges them into debt. (His fragility doesn’t dissuade him from using her money to pay them off.) He rejects her sexual advances because she is “a mother”, while keeping her cooped up inside to live out some sort of home counties trad-wife fantasy. (He only shows an interest in her when she confesses that another man gave her an orgasm.) At the office, he demeans Sweetpea for having an OnlyFans account, while secretly watching her content while he clutches his baby son.
Both women go from being props in Rishi’s masculine drag act, to markers of his downfall. In the season finale, when Harper takes her revenge on Rishi by humiliating him in her office, calling him a “dinosaur”, it’s Sweetpea who shows him the door. And, most shockingly, when Diana is murdered by a debt collector, her blood splattering over Rishi’s helpless face completes his emasculation.
There is such loneliness in how Industry’s men are tormented by the passing of time. Henry and Rob come from different backgrounds, but they’re both grieving a parent and worry they will never forge their own futures. Rishi struggles to balance his two sides, with Kay noting that even his socially aware podcaster wife wanted him to be “a prehistoric man in the bedroom and a modern man at the dinner table”. And Eric is so anxious about his own mortality that he asks a sex worker whether he “still fucks like a young man”.
In the penultimate episode, Eric declares that “nostalgia is only useful when you’re selling something”. This is a departure for him, as someone who cast himself as a guardian of the bank’s legacy in its 150th year. It’s our first hint that he’s about to do something drastic to protect his beloved institution. In the finale, when Pierpoint is sold off, Eric cries on the empty trading floor and looks at a picture of himself as a young man. “He’s lost his family, he’s done horrific things,” says Down . “And now he’s staring at himself and thinking: ‘Would that kid really be proud of the man staring back at him now?’”
Maybe this is what Industry is trying to say: that to be a man is to be in lifelong negotiation between the past and present, because the changing expectations of masculinity are often in conflict. It’s not just about reckoning with your own past, but deciding whether you want to be different from the generations of men who came before you.
