“It’s all you ever wanted, the validation of your betters and functioning codependence with someone as fucked up as you are.” That’s the brutal yet accurate assessment of Harry Lawtey’s Robert Spearing, one of Industry ’s primary young bankers, delivered by his sexually abusive client, Nicole (Sarah Parish), in the season-three premiere of Industry . Making things all the more brutal, Nicole dies shortly thereafter.
That trauma, and Nicole’s parting words to him, will surely continue to haunt Robert, who arrived at Pierpoint & Co. looking the part of a banker on the rise — he’s a handsome white guy out of Oxford — but possessing a working-class background, audible in Lawtey’s own northern English accent, that has shaped his efforts to fit in among his new peers. So far, that’s been most apparent in his complex relationship with Marisa Abela’s much posher Yasmin, who compensates for her own incompetence at work by controlling Robert sexually.
But those class dynamics become all the more pronounced with season three’s introduction of Sir Henry Muck (series newcomer Kit Harington), to whom Robert has been assigned as Pierpoint takes his green-energy company, Lumi, to IPO. Henry, an actual aristocrat with a slippery sense of business ethics, lords his power over Robert, who finds himself trying to rein in the founder’s impulses while also desperately seeking his approval. In second episode “Smoke and Mirrors,” Robert lashes out at Henry about his.