‘Industry’ Creators on How Their Storytelling and Characters Have Evolved (in Bleepable Ways) and HBO’s “Fantastic Notes”

The traders of Pierpoint were in the London spotlight on Thursday as Industry co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay shared some anecdotes and insights into their hit drama at the inaugural SXSW London during one of Thursday’s Screen Keynote sessions.

“We were in development hell on Industry for three years,” Down recalled. “We wrote the first episode like 60 times.”

He lauded HBO for ordering the show and allowing the creators to let the series evolve over time. “It started off as a slice-of-life London thing,” Down shared. “And that kind of unlocked the show.”

Over time, the series and its characters have grown up, the duo highlighted. Down drew laughs, highlighting how Harry Lawtey’s character Robert has gone from a “two-dimensional fuckboy” to the “emotional heartbeat” of Industry.

Kay shared insight on the growth in terms of storytelling that the creative duo went through. He told the audience that “we were interested in, but not confident enough in expanding the horizon of the trading floor to actually say something, maybe a little bit more about capitalism and Britain.”

But over time, “we started to look at newspapers, politics, the intersection of all that stuff in season three,” he noted. “So when we came back for season four, we wanted to do an actual proper newspaper storyline, or an actual political storyline. We don’t have to wed ourselves necessarily to the financial story. It takes us 18 months to make eight hours of TV. It’s about how we are going to keep ourselves creatively engaged. And the truth is, we’ve got older, we become more interested in this stuff, it’s just a natural broadening of the canvas to keep me and him engaged.”

“My and Mickey’s creative impulse really is a negative one,” said Kay. “That was what we really galvanized over as a creative duo, looking at stuff that we didn’t like rather than what we like.” In their actions with HBO early on, “we would be a little bit sharp-elbowed about the way we interacted with that stuff,” he also shared. “And honestly, their notes are always fantastic, and they continue to be fantastic. And even if we don’t end up doing one of their notes, it makes us interrogate something, or it makes us look at something two steps back. I think we’ve just become, naturally, a little bit more collaborative, and that comes from experience.”

HBO renewed the darkly comic investment-banking drama, starring Marisa Abela, Harry Lawtey and Ken Leung, among others, for a fourth season in September. Season 3 featured their characters making a big bet on a green tech energy company led by a member of the British peerage, portrayed by Kit Harington, who told THR he’s been a long-time fan of Industry.

The showrunner duo met as students at Oxford and went on to work in the finance world depicted in Industry.

SXSW London runs through June 7. Penske Media, the parent company of The Hollywood Reporter, is the majority stakeholder of SXSW.