SPOILER ALERT: This story contains plot details for “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn,” Season 4, Episode 4 of HBO’s “Industry,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Of all the character arcs in “Industry” Season 3, Rishi’s was by far the most jaw-dropping. Not to be outdone by a high-octane “Uncut Gems”-inspired standalone episode in which the near-comically awful Pierpoint head trader desperately attempts — and fails — to recoup spiralling gambling debts, in the season finale, he watched his own wife be shot in the head.
If Rishi, played by Sagar Radia, hadn’t returned for Season 4, few would have been surprised. After all, the audience — and he — needed a breather.
But no, not only did “Industry” creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay bring him back, but they’ve dragged their foul-mouthed punching bag even further through the wringer. While still a coke-snorting and mostly despicable figure, Rishi has now lost much his bravado, and that cock-sure twinkle in his eyes gone as he’s forced to deal with the consequences of his actions. That includes signing away his infant son to his murdered wife’s parents in the hope the child might have a better chance in life than whatever he could offer.
But that still isn’t rock bottom, which Rishi reaches at the shocking end of Episode 4. After a drug-soaked bender with Charlie Heaton’s investigative reporter Jim Dycker, Rishi wakes up to discover that his new acquaintance has overdosed and died in his living room. With the police banging on the door, Rishi decides his only option is to jump off the balcony. But even this doesn’t have the desired outcome, and in a final act of desperation, he attempts to drag his now broken and bloodied body across the cobble stones below before his eventual arrest.
As Sagar notes, however, maybe this was the ending Rishi deserved after all — and that “maybe death would have been the easy way out.”
Rishi obviously had quite a climactic ending in Season 3. What were your first thoughts when you first got the scripts for Season 4 to see what they were going to do to him?
I sat down with the boys, we had a drink and a dinner, and they explained to me what they had in mind for Rishi. The show goes in a very different direction this year. They’ve said it themselves that they wrote themselves into a corner with Rishi. And they were like: OK, how do do we start figuring this out? Because where do you go from your wife being shot in the head! In Season 3, Rishi was the embodiment of survivor energy. He was fast-talking, he was cocky, he was outwardly bulletproof. And then you get to Season 4, and the survival mode is different. It’s surviving financially, it’s surviving emotionally, it’s surviving psychologically. There’s so many different things going through his head. He swings between numb detachment into bursts of self-destructive behaviour, whether that’s drinking or moral disengagement. Ultimately, I think he’s just punishing himself more than anything else.
There are flashes of the old Rishi, but this time there’s something in the eyes, almost like a dog that’s been neutered. There’s a sense of him being painfully aware of his own position, even just in his appearance.
Yeah. I always feel like Rishi’s core fear is his irrelevance. In his early seasons, he’s a loud mouth and he’s boisterous. But now that success and swagger is stripped away. I think he genuinely is facing this question of, “Well, who am I now? Who am I when I’m not performing? Who am I when I’m not at work?” Because so much of his personality was defined by his success at work, and what that felt like. Obviously the background of his wife’s death is haunting him, but who is he as a person anymore? He doesn’t know. And that’s an interesting place to just sit in your head with.
I hope you don’t mind me saying, but Rishi is probably the most dislikable character in a show full of dislikable characters. But this season, you almost feel sorry for him, right?
Yeah, I think so. I think he’s trying to, dare I say, reinvent himself. He’s just trying to start again, and I think he doesn’t know what that looks like. That scene, especially with his mother-in-law, it’s just a moment where he has to just come to terms with the fact he’s not in a place to be a father. Rishi is fucked up. I can’t do that to my kid as well.
He ultimately takes the high ground and goes, OK, if I sign him over at least this kid’s got a chance. So yeah, I agree. I think it just shows the human side to him in a little bit. And hopefully people do warm to that a little bit. I’m always going to defend him and feel like he never came from a bad place. And that’s how I kind of wanted to play him, especially with the scene with the mother-in-law.
So tell me your thoughts when you read Episode 4 and Rishi’s fate.
Shock. Actually, I say shock, but nothing shocks me anymore. I was just excited to play it. It was testing me as an actor, and it was testing Rishi as a character, to see how far he would go with this self-destruction. I spoke with the boys about what they were looking for in that scene, and what we were trying to communicate, and we kind of came to that understanding of relief. He gets to the end of that scene, and he’s pinned to the floor by the cops, and there’s just that small hint of a smile, which was like, “You know what, this is what was needed, this is where I feel that relief after everything that’s happened.”
And I think that was the key word at the front of my head throughout that whole thing. He’s looking for that relief. He’s going through all the self-destruction and at that point, he doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t know what he needs. He’s numbing himself. And it’s only when that moment comes and he’s arrested, there’s a sigh of relief there to be like, “Yeah, this is what was supposed to happen.”
But even though he’s lying on the floor with mangled legs, there’s a sense that he’s hasn’t actually succeeded. He tried to jump to his death and he’s still alive.
I guess the question is whether that jump was him trying to kill himself, or trying to escape. And I think it could be a bit of both. It could be like: You know what? If it’s my time, it’s my time, and if this is the way I go out, then I’ve deserved every moment of it. But if I survive, I’m going to go into survival mode, as Rishi does, and I’m going to try and keep moving forward. And that’s what he essentially does when he’s crawling across the floor just trying to get away. So I wonder if being arrested is him going: This is what I deserve. Maybe death would have been the easy way out. He needs to suffer further.
That bit with you crawling on the floor was absolutely brutal to watch…
It was tough to film! It was a cold night.
I’m assuming this is the end of Rishi, right? Do you think we’ll see him again?
Who knows? It could be. It could not be. If it is, then it’s probably the greatest way to go out. If it isn’t, then there’s great opportunities where maybe Harper goes to see him in jail or something. There are loads of different options that I think could be at play here. So yeah, who knows?
This interview has been edited and condensed.
English (US) ·