When Konrad Kay, the cocreator of HBO’s high-finance drama Industry , says that “the cubicle has a weirdly spiritual dimension in our show,” he somehow isn’t referring to the typical squarish workstations where office drones peck away at their computers. Yes, these Industry cubicles are located in the workplace, and they are small, confined spaces where someone in a high-stress environment like the fictional mega-bank Pierpoint can take phone calls, or sit and strategize, or huddle with colleagues and clients. But they aren’t desks—they’re toilet stalls.
Busy ones. Arguably, haunted ones. “It’s, like, where Hari dies ,” Kay says, speaking by Zoom over the summer and referring to the stress-fueled keel-over of a first-year investment banker in the series’ 2020 pilot.
“It’s where Rob goes to have some sort of transcendental moment,” he adds, describing a Season 3 scene in which another employee trips balls and is visited by ghosts of bathrooms past. “We kind of love it in there!” For viewers of Industry , there’s a whole lot to love in there, too. Ever since the tense, torrid show first premiered, practically every episode has followed characters into washrooms as they do their business and/or do their business .
“I think the bathroom as a space, or just like, the ideology of the bathroom as a space, is a really prominent feature of the entire show,” Harry Lawtey, who plays Rob, tells me over Zoom. “There’s so little room in the univers.