Industry's godmother is Jane Tranter, an influential executive producer who has worked in both Britain and Hollywood. In the early twenties, Tranter came up with the idea of making a show about visitors to the City of London. “I couldn’t understand why young people, after the whole credit crunch and everything that had happened to the banks, were still flocking in droves to come and work in the City,” she told me. “Isn't this the generation that was supposed to save the world from terrible mistakes my generation?” (One of the grim entries in Tranter's research file was the 2013 death of a young intern working at a bank in London who suffered a seizure after working three straight nights without sleep. In the Industry pilot, an intern dies under similar circumstances.) Tranter received a modest budget from HBO to explore the idea, with the directive, she told me, to “just make him young and sexy somehow.” By chance, a colleague met Down and Kay while discussing another project, a psychological thriller, and referred them to Tranter. “They were so smart and personable and just what you need when you’re doing something like this,” Tranter told me. “They both had authenticity, objectivity and clarity.”
On set, the pair work well together—so much so that the cast and crew refer to them by their nickname, “MK.” Actor Ken Leung, who plays Eric Tao, a seasoned trader, told me: “I almost never think of one without the other. You don't want to talk to one about something without the other knowing. It would be wrong.” (One example of score-settling: the scene in which Eric strips in front of his subordinates is based on the behavior of Kay's former senior colleague, who called him into his office on a Friday afternoon to talk about business for the week, while stripping down to his underwear before putting on his weekend clothes.) When Dawn and Kay are interviewed together, they regularly finish each other's sentences. Tranter told me, “I often think that if they're both on their phones during a meeting or on set, they're texting each other.”
The two men have very different temperaments. Down is brimming with ebullient confidence, while Kay is more anxious and thoughtful. Mikha'la told me: “Mickey feels like a superstar, flamboyant, like an old-school director. I know that fact that he really wants to be on the Instagram account Director Fits, where they say: “Look at this great director and look at his amazing outfit.” As for Conrad, I feel like I've seen his heart blossom in real time this season. He has this sparkle in his eyes and chaotic excitement when he says, “Let’s try it.” She continued, “They don't hold onto anything so tightly anymore, and they really want to let us play with them because of the trust that's been built.” Their own ambitions are prohibitively great. “I love reading biographies of John Boorman and David Lean and all these great directors,” Kay told me. “Sometimes I think I won’t be satisfied until I see Mickey on the top of a hill, watching through a megaphone over fifteen hundred extras, directing a big two-and-a-half-hour historical epic.” He continued, “It's like someone blows something up and Mickey says, 'We missed it by thirty seconds,' and the whole shot costs another hundred and twenty thousand.” What I care.”
Dawn and Kay met in 2007. Down had just entered his first year at Oxford, and Kay was a second year student. Down recalled that Kay was playing foosball: “I sidled up to him and he said, 'Oh, you're new, you're not going to fucking like it here.' They were both members of Regent's Park College, which has a large number of theological students. Both were sent there after being rejected from older and more prestigious Oxford colleges. Kay failed the interview in his first choice, talking about the Homeric allusions in Ulysses, despite never having read the book. “I screwed up so bad I cried afterwards,” he told me. Both arrived at Oxford with ease and privilege, having been privately educated at exclusive institutions: Down at Charterhouse School (Thackeray, Vaughan Williams) and Kay at King's College School, Wimbledon (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Sickert). Down studied theology; he applied for the subject because he knew that statistically it was much easier to get into Oxford as a theologian than as a historian, his true interest. (Robert Spearing used a similar tactic in Industry.) Kay studied English literature, favoring modules on lean modernist poetry over modules on long Victorian novels. Both did minimal academic work. Down tried his hand at acting, but without much success. “One play was a disaster, it was Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, and the first night I made a mistake and we missed about forty minutes of the play,” he told me. Mostly two people came out.
Entering the television or film industry at the bottom rung, or trying to start a career as a writer, was not a realistic proposition for either man after graduation. Down's parents, who are partners in their own architecture practice in North London, urged him to pursue a sustainable profession such as law. He completed a summer internship at the Home Office and was invited to apply for a job in the intelligence services. Down, whose mother is from Ghana and father is white British, said: “It was a 'fast flow' of diversity. I walked into a meeting and we were all black or brown people. I thought This interesting.” But he didn't get the job. Not knowing what else to do, he successfully applied for a summer internship at Morgan Stanley, and after finishing it went to the Rothschilds. Elite financial institutions in Britain recruit from half a dozen equally elite universities and traditionally admit a significant number of liberal arts graduates, many of whom have never taken an economics course. Of course, not all jobs in finance require mathematical skills: Anraj Rayat, a close friend of Kay's who works as a commercial trader at Barclays, and the inspiration for Rishi Ramdani's confrontational and irascible character in Industry, told me: “There's a job called prime brokerage, and I always say their biggest skill set is asking clients, 'Red or white?' and 'Still or sparkling?' because that's basically all you have to do.” However, it was clear that other qualifications were being considered. Down said: “I wasn't asked a single technical question during the interview – all the questions were about the university and literally talking about people we both knew.”
