Five-plus years ago, when Harry Lawtey first auditioned for the role of Robert Spearing on a new HBO drama called Industry , he had no idea how much he would relate to his character. In the first season of the show—which follows a cohort of sexed-up, coked-out Zillennial bankers—Rob is the portrait of a dirtbag who shags in the club bathroom, snorts lines before work, and buys a motorcycle on a whim. But over the course of the show’s three seasons, Rob transforms from a debaucherous party boy desperate to shed his working-class roots into an empathetic young man questioning his role in the Pierpoint system.
Now, “I feel like [Robert’s] closer to me than he ever was at the start,” Lawtey, 27, says. “I think I was perhaps cast on the basis of that, really.” Newly anointed with HBO’s prime Sunday night time slot, Industry is readying its ascent from cult favorite to outright classic—just in time for Lawtey’s best performance yet.
Season 3 casts him as the emotional anchor to his chaotic colleagues-turned-roommates, Harper Stern ( Myha’la ) and Yasmin Hanani-Kira ( Marisa Abela ). But just because Rob’s matured doesn’t mean his life is without challenges: After suffering a traumatic loss in the first episode (the first of many gasp-inducing moments this season), Rob’s “dam broke,” as Lawtey puts it. In the actor’s eyes, the third season forces his long-suffering character to take a serious look inward.
“He’s just a lost boy at the end of the day,” Lawtey tells Vogue. “He has no idea what he’s doing, and he is grasping for help—often from the wrong people.” Below, Vogue talks to Harry Lawtey about Robert’s psychosexual hangups, the future of Industry , and sharing the screen with Lady Gaga and Jaoquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux .
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Vogue : What has the reception to Season 3 been like for you so far? Harry Lawtey: It’s been really lovely. It feels like the culmination of our work over the last five years, almost like we’ve been building to this point.
Since the start, we’ve always put so much heart into the show and really given it our all. For people to be engaged with it and discussing it is exactly what you want to try and provoke. I think we all feel a little bit more comfortable and confident in terms of where we stand in our relationship with the material, and Mickey [Down] and Konrad [Kay]—our writers—have certainly taken bigger swings.
We all have a sense of, like, We’re here now, so we might as well just go for it , and it’s really nice to see that that’s landing in some way. Do you have any standout memories of filming that you can share? I’m so close with the girls, Myha’la and Marisa. The three of us have been a really tight trio since the very beginning, so whenever I get the chance to just work alongside them, I think we really make each other happy.
It’s such a gift that we’ve, by chance, been thrown into this experience together and it has always been such a chemistry and a kinship between us. For us it’s just fun, it’s working with your best mates and seeing those relationships evolve and grow. One of the real highlights for me on this season—without a shadow of a doubt—[was] working with Ken Leung, who plays Eric.
I just think he is the most extraordinary actor and he’s such a wonderful person. He’s so wise and kind, and he is like a Jedi. I never had that much stuff with him in the past on the show.
We got to be together and see how it works between Eric and Rob on this season, and that was such a joy for me. I learned a lot from him—about acting and about life, to be honest. I hope that doesn’t sound too grand, but no one really gets it until they meet him and then they’re like, Wow, this dude is different.
He’s a genius, and to be able to form a friendship on a whole new level was really special for me. You have a scene in the first episode where Eric teaches Rob the mantra “I am a man and I am relentless.” We know Rob has just gone through something traumatic, and I feel like there’s this expectation that he just gets over it.
What was it like filming that scene? The reaction to that moment has been really interesting. I’ve had a strange amount of people quoting it back to me in the past week, and I dunno if that’s a good thing or not. I certainly don’t want to become the face for toxic masculinity within the show, which I think that moment is representative of, to a degree.
It was difficult to shoot. It was a very intense day. For me, they’re the big climactic moments of the arc, even though it was so early on.
As an actor, it’s a real gift to be given a responsibility like that, but you also really want to get it right and honor whatever was intended with it. I remember saying to Mickey and Konrad, I think Robert has spent the whole show wanting to cry and not being allowed, and finally, this was a moment where the dam broke and it all got too much. Konrad said that everyone in the show hides their heart under 10 sheets of iron cladding, and Rob’s the only one who wears it on his sleeve.
I hope that gives him a human, relatable quality, but also it makes him very vulnerable. The institution that he operates within is so unsympathetic to that; it can’t condone weakness because it’s so driven by success in such a binary way. It all boils down to numbers at the end of the day—that’s how you accrue any kind of validation or worth in an ecosystem like that.
I just don’t think, ultimately, that’s who Rob is, and I don’t think that’s the kind of affirmation that serves him. When he’s out on a limb emotionally, there’s no framework to support that other than someone sort of bullying him into strength. This season has some rather shocking moments.
In the first episode, Rob wakes up and Nicole is dead next to him. You’ve referred to this moment as the dam breaking, which forces him to recontextualize his life. What was your reaction to Nicole’s death? The boys [Down and Kay] have this approach of wanting to burn their best ideas.
They aren’t writers who wait to save their best bits til the end of the season. If they have an idea, they want to run with it and they write their way out, which I think is very brave storytelling. I think an example of that is Nicole’s death.
Sarah Parish, who plays Nicole, has been such a fantastic addition to the show from the beginning. She has, in a very short amount of screen time, always made such an impact. It was a shock to me absolutely when I read it, and it sees the end of a really significant relationship for Robert—one that in itself is very confusing and wrapped up in all sorts of ideas around power and motherhood and consent.
He has this absented figure of a mother who he is clearly trying to replace in the most ordinary way, by latching onto someone significant, someone older, who he feels like he can be nurtured by either professionally or personally. But then he is put into a position in the previous season where he is forced to rethink whether his gateway to that relationship was consensual, whether he was coerced, whether he was a victim of an abuse of power, and whether that is even possible for him. It’s something I don’t think—in his fairly one-track masculine psyche—he’s ever really pondered.
I suppose the byproduct of that maelstrom of ideas is just to keep on returning to [the relationship] in the hope that he will figure it out. And then the one night he does, she’s gone and he’s left with the grief and confusion. We’ve seen him lose a lot of people over the course of the show, which is why he is getting to the point he’s considering whether he is cursed.
He’s been put through the wringer. When Nicole dies, it’s quite a profound grief that he is plundering through, and the only way he knows how to articulate that to someone is by saying that he’s lost a client, which, in essence, is true. She was his client, but he doesn’t feel like he has license to speak any kind of truth about what that means to him and how she was more than that, for good or for bad.
I’d love to talk about the other bookend of the season, albeit in vague terms. The final episode is such a whirlwind of emotions for you especially. All I can say, I suppose, is that it feels like something that we’ve been waiting for, in terms of the people who make it.
It felt exciting, but also I remember vividly feeling a lot of pressure in the weeks leading up to the final block of shooting, more so than I felt—as far as I can remember—with the show. I was so keen to try and do a good job and get it right. I want to ask you, what did you think? Of the ending? I think it’s a cohesive ending in line with the characters and their values.
I’ve never seen it. You haven’t seen the finale yet? I’ve never seen any of it, no. I don’t watch it.
Can you not watch your own stuff? Not really, no, to be honest. But I’m intrigued if [the ending] feels right for them. What do you make of Rob’s growth over the season? Did making that transition feel continuous or more segmented? I think it’s one of the great joys of being in a long-running show: you get a genuine arc, genuine development and progression that you get to be a spokesperson for as well.
You get to collaborate on that with the writers by this point. When they first wrote the show, they didn’t know who was going to play these characters, so you’re writing into an empty space. Whereas now, I always imagine it [like] those frames with the cutout faces and you can put your head in them.
When they write—whether they like it or not—it’s our face in the thing. Naturally, our own lives and characters bleed into the roles and the lines become more blurred and you become more of this amorphous thing. I’ve certainly felt that with Robert.
In the final stages of my audition, I remember Mickey and Konrad telling me, “Just be a bit more you”—whatever that means—because the character that I identified on the page wasn’t necessarily what they wanted long-term, and I didn’t have that kind of context, presented with someone quite reprehensible and pretty vapid and unlikeable. What they wanted in the long run, I suppose, was a lot more texture and humanity and humbleness—someone we could root for. Do you have any insight on a potential Season 4? There’s not really much I can say to that, really.
It’s sort of above my pay grade, to be honest. I dunno if anyone really knows for sure—it’s always been in the hands of HBO, who have always been really supportive. From my perspective, it feels like they’ve always taken the leash off and just let us see what we can come up with.
You’re also in the new Joker film. Can you tell me about your experience on set? As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s not a great deal I can say other than it’s a hugely ambitious film and it’s got such a bespoke vision in terms of what they’re going for. It certainly leaves it all out there.
How was it working with Lady Gaga in Joaquin Phoenix? Genuinely surreal. These people are icons. To share space with them and to work alongside them was an education and a roller-coaster.
I went in—and thankfully came out—with such a huge amount of admiration for them both. They’re brilliant artists and very holistic ones as well. They’re using every tool at their disposal, and to have a front row seat to that is a real privilege.
I feel very fortunate. I almost can’t quite believe it happened, to be honest. I mean that genuinely—it feels a little bit like some sort of hyper dream.
I feel like this is never said enough about anyone: They’re both just really kind. They’re just really cool, lovely, very down-to-earth people. They were leading this movie, but they want to be a part of the team and collaborate, and they recognize that they’re surrounded by experts who want the same thing as them.
You don’t have to be a type of way, you can just do your work and treat everyone around you with real generosity and dignity and respect, while at the same time being an icon of your craft. And that was a really affirming lesson to see, because you hear so many horror stories and none of it is necessary. You can be really great and really nice.
I can’t wait for everyone to see what they’ve both achieved. Styling: Aimee Croysdill. Grooming: Charlie Cullen.
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