Full spoilers below for HBO's Industry, Episode 6.
If last week’s Industry episode, “Eyes Without a Face,” threw the pebble from inside the glass house, Episode 6, “Dear Henry,” shows the fast-spreading spider cracks before the walls full-on shatter and collapse. Last week, Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) and Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh)’s thrilling investigative romp in Accra confirmed that Tender was nothing but a shell, a forgery puppeted by Whitney Halberstam (Max Minghella). This week, we got a real look at the extent of Whitney’s con that’s been bubbling just under the surface all season long, how much Henry and Yasmin have to lose, and the piles of money Harper and Eric have to gain from their risky bet in shorting Tender.
“You just gave me my favorite day in finance,” Eric tells Harper the day after she laid out her team’s findings about Tender at a women in finance conference. The markets had opened, Tender’s stock had tanked. Later, Eric twists the knife in Tender in a CNN co-interview with Whitney, demanding another audit of the company. The SternTao consortium won, and the team gets to take a rare victory lap full of pride for their work in their $100k-a-month hotel-office. (According to Myha’la and Ken Leung, it was built on a soundstage in Wales but modeled after an actual hotel. In the show, you’ll spot brand markers for the Hyde Park Hotel – the closest I could find after a good bit of Googling were rooms that looked mighty similar with the price tag to match at the Mandarin Oriental in Hyde Park.)
Of course, it was all too good to be true: Eric receives a blackmail text with video of him with a woman from earlier in the season and a photo of her passport; she’s underage. He’s cooked. He backs out of the company through a lawyer on extremely charitable terms – another rare attempt at generosity to Harper – but doesn’t divulge anything beyond “reputational risks.” This scene between the two of them cuts deeper than their past blowouts of who could hurl the cruelest jabs; it’s so much more devastating for Harper to be betrayed after they had built up mutual goodwill, pride, and respect for each other. Though Industry has yet to be renewed for a fifth season, it’s hard not to wonder if this is really the end for Eric as he walks off in the credits to the Judy Collins version of “Both Sides Now.”
IGN spoke with Myh’ala and Leung about Harper and Eric’s cycle of falling-outs that led to this one, allowing their characters a moment of legitimate happiness, and Whitney’s slimy new brand of evil, which is new, even for Industry.
The Harper-Eric Connection
IGN: What drives the magnet that keeps pulling Harper and Eric together? And how does moving out of Pierpoint this season make that more apparent?
Ken Leung: I think they recognize themselves in each other. Maybe in the beginning, he saw a younger version of what he had to... The kind of resilience and chutzpah that she showed in that first interview – he saw something of himself. And I think he turns to her this season to answer questions [about himself]. It's come to the point where, "Well, if you resemble me, then if I have a question that I can't answer for myself, maybe you can." So she becomes a capsule of that kind of mirror for him.
Myha'la: I think Eric's always been an idol of Harper's. She comes in seeing a version of herself in him like, "This is what I could be." And he feels like the only person who has the kind of volatile, dirty, scrappy energy towards finance, someone who will just support her, even if he's not that way anymore. She's like, "You get me. I know you'll support me." And when they don't have the bank's structure, then they can play out this pseudo-parental thingy without any prying eyes or [it being] an HR issue. But also, I think Harper is like, "Oh, it's not like that. Let's not go there explicitly because we know it's happening, but let's just not say it because the second we say [it], it's going to ruin everything and we're not going to be able to work together." And she's right. She turns out to be totally right.
Two Seconds of Happiness – “It Was Bizarre and Foreign”
IGN: Your characters have these very public victories – Harper in the women's forum and then Eric on CNN – in this episode. I'm curious about your reaction to them getting to experience genuine happiness before it all just comes crashing down.
Ken Leung: It's very freeing. I mean, it's almost, like, for two seconds you're allowed to dance. And so it's fun.
Myha'la: It is fun. It was also funny to be like, "What does Harper look like when she's laughing and smiling?" Oh, we're so excited about this. What does it look like when I'm not panicking? I'm just happy about something or excited about the future of something. Still locked in and I'm grown. But also what does success feel like in a relaxed way? Which was weird, actually, to feel in her body. It was bizarre and foreign, which I think it's okay for her to be uncomfortable when she's genuinely doing well. She's not used to it. [It was] teeing us up for the worst, as always.
Whitney Halberstrom, a New Type of Industry Villain
IGN: Both Harper and Eric get to face off with Max Minghella’s Whitney in this episode. What was it like playing off of him in these scenes and just having him as a new sort of evil in the show this season?
Myha'la: He was slimy. I feel like most of the villains [in] Industry, you can see them. They're not hiding really. Like Roger [Barclay]'s character [Otto Mostyn] who's like, "I said the r-word and I might just say it again!" It's obvious that he's not a nice dude. But Whitney, it feels weird, strange... The threat of violence or terror feels imminent, but he's doing it so quietly and in riddles, which is just creepy, bro.
Ken Leung: There's an effortlessness to it, too.
Myha'la: Yeah, you don't really have to do much because it's just so arresting.
IGN: Whitney singing to Harper over the phone gave me goosebumps, like, "This is awful to watch. I hate this."
Myha'la: You should have been there because our AD was the one singing for me and he's super-duper Welsh and he loves to sing. So it was actually kind of beautiful when he was doing it, not nearly as creepy as when I heard Max doing it, but I had to pretend like it was creepy. But inside, I was like, "Oh my God, you have such a great voice."
The Anatomy of a Harper/Eric Blowout
IGN: Throughout the show, your characters have had these very intense fights over and over again. When you’re shooting these scenes, are you doing tons of takes, trying to find the right level of viciousness? Or do you feel like you have it all locked in by now of how they should be approaching each other in any of those moments?
Myha'la: The nature of the way we both like to work is that no two takes are ever really the same, and there are varying degrees of ferocity. But there's a version of that scene [in this episode] that I think happened first where we prepare ourselves of how we're going to enter the scene and then whatever happens takes precedence. And I saw him and the way he was, and it was too much for me to not try to comfort him. So there's a version of that scene in the can somewhere where Ken reminded me I'm being soothing and I'm being careful and I'm being sensitive. And then, of course, there's a version of it where however he's being is making me angry because of my own hurt feelings. And so then I'm the way that you end up seeing in the show. But almost every time we've done a scene like that, it's been this way.
The first time ever, the first scene that we did together when he shuts the door and he's yelling at me in Season 1, I was like, "Oh, I'm having a hard time. I feel like there needs to be tears here," but I don't know that I would start crying when someone was yelling at me like that at work. I would just freeze up. And Ken was like, "Cool, well, I can do something else." And I said, "Well, why don't you just say the words? You don't have to raise your voice or anything. I feel like I would be more affected if you just spoke them to me."
And he did and I was. So in the actual doing of the thing, the exploring is not necessarily to find what's the best way, what is the actual way, because there are so many ways that that scene could go depending on how we enter it. Whatever you see in the final edit is whatever version of Harper and Eric that [show creators] Mickey [Down] and Konrad [Kay] need for their storytelling. But because of the nature of our relationship and because of how the show works, we do a lot of exploring in the thing and every take is a possibility.
Ken Leung: I have to say that moment in the first season, I feel like you, Myha'la, gifted both of us a way to work by voicing what you just said. She had the honesty and kind of self-possession to say, "This doesn't work for me." Not everybody would have the kind of wherewithal to do that. You have to have a sense of how you work, what you need, what works for you, what doesn't work for you. And also you're telling the other actor, "I trust you." And so I think that unlocked something that gave us a way of working that served us for all the years after.
Myha'la: I think that was around the time also where I was like, "How do you cry?" And you were like, "I think of something happy." And I was like, "Oh, my God. Damn." So then because it's not method-y where I'm like, "Oh, I think of some sad whatever." It's just, like you said, understanding how am I affected? I know if someone yells at me, I'm just like, "Fuck you." I don't pay attention because that's just not how I work.
Ken Leung: Sometimes you have to think of something sad. Sometimes something sad works. Just don't forget about the happy.
Myha'la: Because what if the sad thing doesn't work that day? And that day you yelled and it didn't work for me. And because sometimes it just doesn't work and that's okay, but you still have to get the shot. So you have to have some other ways to get there.
Ken Leung: Right. Because it's all in there. It's about how do you coax it? How do you coax it now? How do you invite it into the room now?
Myha'la: Because of how long and how well we've worked together for such a long time, we know these things about each other immediately. So we just don't have to work as hard as maybe we did before. We were developing this language between us for, whatever, six years.
“I Will Always Remember You Like This”
IGN: Do you remember what you were feeling during that line?
Myha'la: I think the take that they ended up using, I was just so angry. I was so angry, and I wanted him to feel as much pain as possible because I was in so much pain. So I wanted to be mean and I wanted to be hurtful. And obviously as soon as I turned around, I was just in pain.
Ken Leung: I don't know that I could give a name to what I was evoking, but it's almost the feeling of this is the way I know how to love and the recipient is taking it the wrong way or is not receiving it that way. So it's that heartbreak of something breaking. One would think that if I am loving, it will be received that way, obviously. So when it's not, something breaks in your own understanding of things.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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