HBO’s Industry floated under the radar for its first two seasons—a delicacy with a cult following that I once described as the missing link between Euphoria and Succession. Now that the Roy family has taken permanent leave from our screens, maybe this adrenaline rush of a financial drama can fill the void with its own morally twisted, witty, and watchable characters.

Co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were fledgling showrunners when they first started writing Industry. “Season one very much felt like we were flying by the seat of our pants all the time,” Down tells me. “It was my and Konrad’s first proper job outside of finance, and it had this kind of rebellious attitude.” In season two, they wanted to prove to HBO that they could write strong storylines, but as Down says, “I think we actually overcorrected: It feels quite formal in its structure, and I think some of the weirdness that we had in season one was lost slightly. What we were trying to do in season three was meld those two things together.”

Season three picks up the pieces that were smashed at the end of the last season, with 20-somethings Yasmin (Marisa Abela), Harper (Myha’la), and Robert (Harry Lawtey) all struggling to keep themselves psychologically afloat. Yasmin’s troubles are the most extreme: She’s been swept up in a family scandal, with London’s tabloids dubbing her “the Embezzler Heiress” and paparazzi stalking her. “You must be getting lots of dick pics,” quips a new girl on the Pierpoint investment bank’s trading floor. “I actually accrued quite a passionate gay following,” Yasmin replies proudly.

There’s no shortage of memorable set pieces in Industry, like the trader with a coke-induced nosebleed watching porn while holding his baby. But it’s the troubled and troubling characters who make the show. “They are beautiful fuckups,” Kay says affectionately. “We can’t write the characters without loving them.”

The newest addition to the Beautiful Fuckup Society is Game of Thrones alum Kit Harington as Sir Henry Muck, the aristocratic founder of a green energy company that Pierpoint is taking public. Henry also has a penchant for being peed on. After years as earnest Jon Snow, the role finally gives Harington a chance to have fun onscreen. (Can you imagine Jon Snow wrestling in a children’s ball pit or gobbling psychedelics?) He also makes a good spokesman for tech bro bullshit. When someone snipes that his company is built on nothing, Henry looks stunned. “Everything’s built on nothing!” he shouts. “That’s how you build something: You talk it into becoming.”

Ahead of Industry’s season three premiere on Aug 11, Down and Kay joined me over Zoom to discuss toxic masculinity, prosthetic penises, the possibility of a Succession/Industry crossover, and the odds for a fourth season.

Vanity Fair: In season one, you built a world. Season two, you’re delving deeper into the characters. Each season finale, you kind of burn it all down. So how did you approach season three?

Mickey Down: The thing is, we never think we’re going to get another season. We always think at the end of each season that we’ve written our last episode of the show, so we write towards that end. It also means that, when we do come back, we throw everything in the wall. And now we have these characters who are several years into a career, doing stuff that actually can have slightly higher stakes than just getting salad orders and being sexually harassed by your boss—not that those aren’t high stakes.

We thought, let’s just expand the world and show how the business works. Let’s show the connectivity between this IPO of a green energy company and how that relates to the bank, the press, the government, and how there’s a quid pro quo relationship between these big spheres of influence. We thought we might not get a fourth season, and so let’s try and do all of that while also maintaining this Gen Z relationship workplace drama.

So, nothing too ambitious.

Down: Yeah! Season two definitely had the vibe of COVID. We dubbed Eric (Ken Leung) “Sad Eric” in season two. What we wanted to reflect in this season was the back-to-work mentality, which you see in Eric. Yes, he’s having a midlife crisis again in season three, but a very different kind of midlife crisis that means he’ll be quite good at his job,

This season, Eric seems to be willing himself to power. He has a mantra he shouts when he’s trying to rev up himself and Robert: I’m a man and I’m relentless!

Konrad Kay: Toxic masculinity was on display in the first season. Obviously, there was a cultural reckoning in the workplace, and in season two, I think Eric was maybe feeling like he had to be more careful about this stuff. We felt we’d lost a bit of that supercharged, super angry version of him. He’s trying to find his power again. In the writers room, we were thinking about the season as a kind of darkening of Eric’s soul. So that line was him buying back into that macho culture of: I’m a man and nothing else matters, apart from my own self-interest, and my own self-actualization.

Last season, you introduced Jesse Bloom as an outside provocateur. This season, it’s Sir Henry Muck. What was the inspiration, and did you have Kit Harington in mind from the start?

Down: We wanted to show how a bank like this would operate within a real-world context, with a company that people can understand. And we wanted to do it through a more cynical lens, like a green energy startup run by this paragon of privilege. We’ve seen the Adam Neumann/Elizabeth Holmes version of a startup CEO, and we tried to think of the British real equivalent of that. They’re always insanely privileged, and then, when it gets fucked up, the government’s there to bail them out. But the groundwork’s been laid for success for him, so that, when he doesn’t get it, I think he feels like an even bigger failure. I think he really has insecurity about his privilege.

Kit plays Muck with such a great mixture of narcissism and vulnerability.

Down: Kit found the vulnerability in someone who is, on paper, really without empathy. A right-wing billionaire scion of a family that is probably to blame for many of the bad things that have happened in the last 30 years. And for some reason, I think we empathize with him, because he has obviously had all this trauma. There’s this young, vulnerable child wanting to be loved.

Kay: I think Kit recognized a few things about ambition, but also about the sorts of people that he might have grown up around, and also the sort of people he met post-Thrones. We only spent about 20 minutes in each other’s company before we hired him. He said that, in 10 years of Game of Thrones, he never once got to make a joke. He would beg David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] to write him a joke, and they would kind of tease him about the fact that he was so self-serious and honorable. And he’s so funny in this part! The show’s not a comedy, obviously. We were just trying to make sure season three is denser but also more light on its feet.

We find out that Henry Muck is notorious for his sexual quirks. I couldn’t help wondering if Henry would get along with Kendall Roy, who probably also has a penchant for being peed on.

Down: There’s no doubt, if we expand the universe of these business-adjacent shows on HBO, that they would be friends.

Kay: In the real world, 100%.

If you ever feel like doing a crossover Succession/Industry episode at some point, I give you my blessing.

Down: I think Jesse Armstrong might have something to say about that. [Both laugh.] There’s slightly more upside for us.

Yasmin’s journey this season from debauched socialite to embezzler heiress is extremely dark. Can you talk a little bit about shooting the yacht scenes that open the first episode and run through the season?

Down: It was really intense. The actors poured themselves into these performances…it’s just the most raw emotion you could possibly have. By the end of it, Marisa had no voice. We were at sea and she’s just screaming against the wind.

What happens on the yacht is so disturbing, and it hangs over the whole season. I have to ask: Is there an actual penis onscreen?

Down: There is. I mean, it’s not an actual penis…

I figured it was a prosthetic stand-in, but it’s still shocking.

Down: It pops up twice in the season. There are so many complex characters in the show behaving in a very complex way, sometimes in a way that doesn’t provoke empathy very readily. But we needed to show this character, Charles, who, even in the realm of this show, is a bad dude. He is a monster, and you need to understand why Yasmin is the way she is—how these are the sort of people she grew up around.

Kay: There’s something about the explicitness of it as an image. Obviously, you can look at it and say, Oh, it’s Industry being gratuitous again. But for us, it was very much: That’s seared on the viewer’s memory like it’s seared on her memory.

I suppose you do have to raise the stakes in a way because you have a lot of sordid things going on in their everyday lives. Has there been anything so extreme that HBO asked you to cut it?

Down: HBO, they’re not ones for censorship. They never told us to pull stuff out because it’s too much. The BBC would not allow that penis to appear onscreen on BBC One. It was clipped.

Harper has a new job this season and might be in a position to antagonize her old Pierpoint colleagues. Is she in her villain era?

Kay: She certainly is.

Down: In season one and season two, she’s trying to work out what sort of person she wants to be. That shark-like mentality is at the core of her character. In season three, we really have fun leaning into that, but making it way more explicit. There’s a scene where she’s sat with Eric for the first time, and she tells him to look at her. Myha’la plays it in such a great way, such a glint in her eye. She’s taking so much pleasure in the fact that she’s now forcing Eric into this inversion of power and status with her. That’s the Harper we’re gonna basically be following for the rest of the season—one that is focused on her own career, unshackled by Pierpoint.

Robert is the only major character I would trust—or at least he seems least likely to be a sociopath.

Kay: Everybody in the show has their heart under 10 levels of sheet iron, and his is kind of on his sleeve. If you walk around the Pierpoint trading floor and you’re feeling everything and wondering what everyone thinks about you and looking for love, you’re destined to failure or death.

You mentioned that you treat each season as if it’s the last, but are you thinking about a fourth season?

Kay: We always scorch the earth because it feels narratively satisfying. Also it provides a nice conundrum, which is, like, we’ve got to write ourselves out of a tricky box in the next season. But yeah, we are obviously happy to do season four. It’s always a case of HBO wanting to see how the show performs before they do more of it. We’ve got a really strong season four idea, super ambitious, and so as long as there’s willingness from HBO, we will continue to do it.

The show portrays the finance world as a grotesque moral void, but it also makes it seem intoxicating. Was that your own experience?

Down: It felt like a kind of sexy workplace to me. That was more born of literature and art surrounding finance than actual finance itself—I found out, when I got to my bank, that it wasn’t very much like any of the books or films I’d read or watched. But it is a very adrenalized world, which is quite fun to be a part of, especially when you’re young.

The wider point is that anything that has a turn into darkness has to feel very seductive in the first place. You can watch The Wolf of Wall Street and think: That is incredible, he’s doing so much coke and he’s driving a Ferrari and having the best life—if you don’t really think about the third hour where he loses his entire family, he’s in jail, he’s a fucking drug addict, all that stuff. Those [films] draw you in and then show you the problem, where I think we just maybe continually show the problem the whole time. Maybe some people are seduced by it? I still get LinkedIn messages saying: “Your show is the reason I went into finance.”

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.