The Talented Mr. Whitney: Constructing the Con at the Heart of ‘Industry’

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Industry” Season 4, Episode 6, “Dear Henry.”]

Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are not precious about how they approach the “Industry” story world they’ve created.

“HBO gives us a huge amount of creative latitude. There’s no IP, there’s no real fan base to service, it’s really mine and Mickey’s brainchild,” Kay said. “We often ask ourselves the question, if we weren’t doing ‘Industry,’ what would we be doing?  And can we Trojan Horse that into the show in some way?”

After concluding major story arcs in Season 3, the bold question Down and Kay contemplated: Could they shoehorn their favorite conspiracy-thrillers — everything from Alan Pakula’s ’70s trilogy to ‘80s erotic thrillers to “Michael Clayton” — into their episodic series of young, hungry, and horny characters striving for success in the London financial world.

“What would this show look like if you knew the characters, you were embedded with them, you had history with them, and then we strapped them to a thriller engine?” Kay said. “Can we put all the pieces on the chessboard? Give something that, week to week, had the watchability of [those] great movies.”

A test of just how malleable the series could be came in Episode 5, “Eyes Without a Face,” in which the show leaves London on a detour into a full-on Michael Mann-inspired investigation. The creators acknowledged Mann’s “The Insider” as a direct influence, cinematically and narratively.

The series’ financial backdrop proved to be an ideal canvas for their conspiracy-thriller aspirations. A lesson of the 2008 financial crisis is that one of the key markers of financial fraud is that the perpetrators create complexity to mask their schemes: fertile ground for the conspiracy genre’s plot conventions.

“The story of the season is: Can this guy make something so complex against the clock? And while a team of other people are incentivized to bring him down?” Down said.

A Reverse Ripley

The real challenge would be navigating how to draw the perpetrator of the fraud — Whitney, played by Max Minghella, who’s a necessarily enigmatic character — in a show about naked ambition.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley” was a big influence, as Whitney is cut from a similar mold as Patricia Highsmith’s con artist Tom Ripley (played by Matt Damon in the 1999 movie adaptation and Andrew Scott in the recent Netflix series). But narratively, there’s a huge difference between the two: Whereas the viewer in a Ripley story partakes in his confidence schemes, Whitney is far more opaque. As other characters poke for answers, we start to see the shape of his con (with Episode 5 laying bare Tender’s African shell game), but it’s not until Episode 6 that we’re given a real glimpse behind the curtain.

Matt Damon and Anthony Minghella on set of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’©Miramax/courtesy Everett / Everett Collection

Down and Kay are profuse in praising Minghella’s performance, but they also embraced what the actor’s background brought to the character, including being the son of the late Oscar-winning Anthony Minghella, who directed the 1999 version of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

“Obviously, he’s a phenomenal actor,” Down said, “but there is an intertextual circularity about having Anthony Minghella’s son play this character, which we absolutely enjoy.” Added Kay, “Also, the fact that Max is an Englishman, who’s only known as an American really on screen, there’s an identity thing going on there.”

The Letter: A Voice-Over Con

The “Industry” creators also gave Minghella credit for helping find the tricky balance of how to portray Whitney, with the actor giving notes that resulted in script rewrites. According to Kay, Minghella told the creators, “‘I want to understand what this guy’s sense of humor is like, I want to understand a little bit about the actual humanity before we go into [what Max called] ‘full sociopath.’”

Maintaining that enigmatic balance was all leading to Episode 6, in which Whitney writes his “Dear Henry” letter.

“He’s just a construction, this sort of self-mythologizing person,” Down said. “It’s very difficult to understand, ‘What’s true?’ ‘What’s fiction?’ and we thought this was the episode where you actually get [under] the hood a little bit.”

But how to get under that hood? And what would be too much? The success of Episode 6, and ultimately the con at the heart of Season 4, would rest on the answer.

The creators had never considered using voice-over in “Industry” — a device they believed screamed “crutch” — but early in breaking Season 4, they had latched onto the idea of Whitney writing Henry a letter. As a potential voice-over device, it could be perfect: If the audience didn’t know Minghella’s narration was him writing the letter until the end, its meaning would change, giving it a Whitney-esque duality.

“[The VO] feels like this guy’s inner life, and then [once the letter is revealed] what he’s actually doing is enjoying the sound of his own voice, more self-mythologizing,” Kay said. “It’s this romantic ideal that then becomes cold, it becomes pragmatic, it becomes about the deal again.”

As a stylistic and storytelling device, the duo fell in love with the letter — Down said he still delights in its craftsmanship and elegant handwriting, even after countless hours in the editing room — but they were afraid it could put a hole in their own scriptwriting bucket.

“Me and Mickey – I mean, the construction of it is one thing – we always laugh at each other privately about how stupid it is for a criminal to write a confession letter,” Kay said. “But we had to put that in a box, because we loved it so much creatively.”

They can laugh now because it worked, but it was genuine fear, with the creators feeling the need to add some extra sealant in how the letter potentially implicates Henry (best evidenced in the beginning of episode 7, next week).

Kit Harrington Takes a Shower

Down made the case for Season 4 to work in the mold of the great conspiracy thrillers that inspired it, Whitney’s character had to pay off in Episode 6, otherwise he would have just felt like “a cipher” there to motivate the conspiracy.

Henry (Kit Harrington) would be key to this reveal. Voyeuristically and lustfully watching Henry shower is maybe low-lying fruit — a fit Harrington lathering up had proven to be lust-inducing for Yasmin in Season 3, and Whitney drawing dangerously close supplies a real sense of the risk he’s taking. The surprise is Henry’s response, the opposite of the angry WTF we’re nervously anticipating.

“There’s a sort of moment of reciprocity where you’re like, ‘Oh, actually, Henry’s leaning into it as well. What does that mean about his sexuality?’” Down said.

It ignites a sexual charge that propels Whitney and Henry’s Episode 6 exploits, which Kay gives credit to Harrington for elevating what’s on the page. “Kit’s line reading of, ‘I’ll be a minute, old boy,’ it’s one of his best line readings in the show, because it’s got all of the history of boarding school. It’s sexualized, domineering.”

“Both Sides” of the Glory Hole

Judy Collins “Both Sides Now” becomes the musical motif of Episode 6, first heard playing when Whitney enters the bedroom while Henry is showering. The song, capturing the beauty of life, but through a regretful lens, is the perfect musical note for Eric’s (Ken Leung) last shot, but it’s interesting to note it was originally chosen to capture Whitney’s inner life. Down and Kay said their first idea was for it play in Whitney’s head while watching Henry at the gay night club’s glory hole, but the song’s right’s holders wouldn’t allow it.

‘Industry’

“Both Sides” might seem like a cheeky pun for a glory hole scene, but it also speaks to a regretful emotional undercurrent carried into the scene that follows. After a night of partying, the quiet early morning scene at the water is the most open we’ll ever see Whitney.

“It’s the closest you ever come. There’s moments of sincerity. There’s moments of Henry on the embankment where you get a little bit of who he actually is,” said Downs. “There’s allusions to his background and his family, without the episode, the character would’ve just felt like plot convenience.”

Too Far: Lithuanian VO

How much to reveal about Whitney’s backstory was an open question, with the above scene being where the line was ultimately drawn in both the writers’ and editing rooms. Down and Kay had toyed with Whitney being Lithuanian, or at least having some connection to the country, small remnants of which eagle-eyed viewers will pick up. While on the podcast, Down and Key admitted to contemplating tapping into this in the “Dear Henry” episode.

“We actually had quite a real idea — talking about getting underneath the character’s skin and exploring his inner life a little bit,” Down said. “We were going to have the whole voiceover in Lithuanian. Because there are illusions to the character being Lithuanian in the last few episodes, and we thought, practically, is that going to be interesting?”

Added Kay, “Thank God we didn’t do that.”

Opening the Letter: Season 4 Takes Flight

It all leads to Henry opening his letter and the “There’s a hole in my bucket” confession, marked by a mounting and very un-“Industry”-like music cue from composer Nathan Micay.

“I feel like the show’s operating in all these different sandpits in the first few episodes, and with that music cue and the letter opening and Max with the burner phone, it gives you that hit,” Down said. “The lift to me, that moment always feels like the show taking that Gilroy-ification, like [Episodes] 7 and 8 are going to be different from what you watched before.” (“Andor” and “Michael Clayton” creator Tony Gilroy has been both an inspiration and semi-mentor to Kay and Down.)

“It’s a genre bridge,” Kay said. “Nathan wrote this drone cue which is just a really overwhelming and every time I hit it I was like, ‘Fuck the show’s taking flight in a different way. And for me and Mickey as the creators, we were like, ‘Oh, this is really exciting.’”

To hear Kay and Down’s full interview on March 2, after the season finale, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.