Industry’s Harry Lawtey Sees Robert’s Ambition ‘Through Northern Eyes’

“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 lack of empathy for their own customers, Henry tries to bait Robert into calling him a “posh
cunt ,” and the two get into a wrestling match in the middle of Lumi’s office playground. But Robert is quickly drawn back into Muck’s mess by Yasmin’s scheme to save the Lumi IPO. Robert is called upon to escort Henry to a meeting at a gentlemen’s club, where he must endure not only the aristocratic disdain of Henry’s godfather but also the growing apparentness of the bond of privilege that connects Yasmin and Henry, but does not extend to him.

“He’s always had a case of seeking validation from the wrong places,” Lawtey says of Robert, who has already cemented his place as the bleeding, if misguided, heart of Industry’s third season. Before the season aired, he broke down the factors simultaneously driving  and impeding Robert’s “quintessentially British aspiration.”

This season puts Robert through a lot right off the bat with Nicole’s death and the Lumi IPO. What was it like being shot out of a cannon like that?
It’s nice to play dichotomies, two opposing things in one. So, ostensibly, Robert’s career is going well. He’s given more responsibility as a foot soldier of the bank. At the same time, his personal life is continuing to implode. He started the show as this very maverick guy, very brash and overcompensating, and he’s gradually shriveled.

I like that he’s clearly spent all this money buying the house where he, Yasmin, and Harper are now living but he can’t finish the renovation.
It’s a perfect metaphor, this skeleton around him that is eating him from the outside. It’s also a lovely ode to people not changing. In the first season, he bought a motorbike he doesn’t need and just looks like an idiot on, and the house is an extended version of that.

Did you talk to creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay about where they wanted to take Rob before the season started?
We have a big conversation at the start, where they lay out their ambitions about what they want to do, but it’s always very malleable. You don’t necessarily know what’s coming next. But we’re also at the point where they grant us a lovely level of autonomy. This show has always had a kinetic frenzy to it, and you can feel that you’re in a maelstrom as an actor. A big swing really is the term for this season, and it’s the time for us to be ambitious. The likes of Kit and Sarah Goldberg joining the show helped with that. The fact that they’re so established and wanted to come and be part of our team.

What was it like to work with Kit?
I loved it. We had a bit of a bromance, really. It felt like we had the right kind of chemistry from the off and both understood the place we were fighting from.

One thing that comes to the fore with Kit’s character is the class dynamic between him and Robert. Here’s this posh guy who’s his boss that he both has to serve and can’t stand. What was it like to play that?
I’ve always thought Rob’s arc has been entirely defined by class and his ambition. It’s a quintessentially British aspiration. I can’t say I know a lot more about investment banking than when the show began, but I think that’s not as relevant to what my job is, because that stuff is really a vehicle for discussing notions of class. As Robert has gotten more senior, he’s getting the opportunity to ask questions about who he is and what he wants. He’s always had a case of seeking validation from the wrong places. I don’t know if he’s realized that yet, but there are moments this season when he’s really confronted with that desire. There’s the ethical challenge when he realizes what Henry is doing to Lumi’s customers does not align with his heritage. It’s a strange “have your cake and eat it too” situation, where people want to transcend but also be proud of who they are.

Your own parents are from the north, right?
My parents are both from a small working-class town up north (the town of Barton-upon-Humber), and they met when they were 12 years old. My entire extended family is from that town. I never lived there because my parents moved away. My dad was a military aircraft engineer, and he took a posting down south in Oxford when he was in his early 20s. My parents’ brothers and sisters and friends thought that was incredibly glamorous.

But I have never lived in the place that I feel as though I’m from. I visit every Christmas to see my family and support the football team of that place. There’s a northern twang in my voice, but I don’t immediately sound like that’s where I’m from. I have my own tussles with that. This is a bizarre person to quote, but do you know Rick Astley?

As in “Never Gonna Give You Up”?
Yes, an absolute classic. But I heard this interview with him, and something that really chimed with me — and, I think, feels relevant to Robert in the show — was that he was saying his family is from Manchester. He grew up there in a very working-class household and then came to London and became this global sensation with this song. He said he hadn’t lived in Manchester for 30 years and lives objectively a different class of life, but “I see the world through northern eyes.” I related to that, because I see the world through my parents’ perspective. And I think Robert is exactly that. He’s been placed in this callous dynamic that only measures you on the dynamic of: “Can you make money?” And Rob is all heart and no head sometimes, and the show is a slow journey of him reaching some level of self-discovery.

You, Myha’la, and Marisa Abela have gotten some big career opportunities in film off of Industry. What was it like to have this show as a launching pad?
It’s strange. I try not to think about my career in an out-of-body way, because that’s where madness lies, but Industry has been a significant part of my career, first and foremost, and my life. Sharing it with Marisa and Myha’la … well, they are the show to me. They are so ferociously talented. There’s a real supportive network for the three of us in our little WhatsApp group. We’ve been best mates since week two. We went on a holiday the second month of filming the first season to Brussels. A niche place to go! But, basically, Myha’la needed to leave the country and come back to renew her visa, so it was just somewhere we could go on the Eurostar. A crazy weekend in the home of European diplomacy.

It’s funny in the third season to realize that, oh God, we have new young people coming to the show. We’re not the babies anymore. When I started the show, I was asking everyone questions every day, and then this season someone asked me a few questions, and I realized I had the answers! There has always been a useful mirroring in the fact that we came onto the show playing these graduates fresh out of university and thrown into an environment they didn’t understand, and that was completely true to life. I think we feel like the guardians of these characters now, and they mean something to us and have real personal connections to us. It’s spooky sometimes: I filmed a scene where Robert has a leak in his ceiling, and then a week later, I had a leak in my ceiling!

What are your interactions with Industry fans like? Have you met bankers like Rob who themselves watch the show?
If you go to certain areas or certain bars, the Venn diagram overlap of people who work around there and who watch Industry is pretty high. But I’ve been surprised at how broad the demographics of people who enjoy the show are. The other week, someone came up to me, she was probably in her mid-20s, and said that she and her four flatmates all watch Industry together. That’s a lovely thing! I have a great deal of respect for the show and I love it, but let’s not beat around the bush, it is a fairly cynical show. It has a crude and callous viewpoint of the world, arguably rightly. But the fact that it is something that brought people together in a mini-community, even just in a flat share, is a really nice thing.