Products You May Like
In ELLE.com’s recurring feature Character Study, we ask the creators behind our favorite shows to go deep about what went into creating their memorable characters: the original idea behind them, how they were tailored to the actor, and elements of them we might not see on the screen.
Spoilers below.
Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are ready to talk about Yasmin. They have a lot to say. Marisa Abela’s Industry character went from a critical part of the ensemble in seasons 1 and 2 to being at the center of the gripping third season. This year, we saw Yasmin deal with the disappearance and death of her father and the fallout from his crimes. At the end of the finale we see her engaged to billionaire CEO Lord Henry Muck (Kit Harington), leaving let her will-they-won’t-they coworker Robert (Harry Lawtey) heartbroken.
Yasmin can be shocking in her cruelty, but the third season gave more visibility to the demons that she’s running from. Down and Kay spoke to ELLE.com about what the parts of Yasmin that remain a mystery to them, what they could have done better in season 2, and the simple elements that govern most of Yasmin’s actions.
Harper (Myha’la), Robert (Harry Lawtey), and Yasmin (Marisa Abela).
I’d love to hear about the decision to focus the season on Yasmin.
Mickey Down: Firstly, Marisa is a fantastic actor. And secondly, we thought we didn’t give her much to do in season 2. She had a storyline with her mentor Celeste which, this is us being very self-critical, just dragged throughout the whole season. Some of it could have been condensed into a few episodes.
We thought, let’s just give her more to do. Every time we give her stuff to do, Marisa always does it with so much authenticity and she’s a real joy of an actor to write for. We thought, “Let’s just see what she can do in this respect. Let’s throw her in a totally different scenario and see what it looks like when she’s back on the desk and she’s working with someone like Eric.” We also wanted to explore her personal life and her relationship with her father, which always felt like a really good unexploded bomb for us. There are little snippets of history in the first two seasons about how weird her home life was and how fucked up her relationship with her parents was and we wanted to explore all that.
Considering the last few minutes of the finale, do you have a sense of whether she was abused by her father? How much did you want to get into that?
Down: There’s definitely something there. There’s obviously a trauma that has been buried, which we’d love to explore in later seasons.
Konrad Kay: The epilogue, i.e. all the stuff that happens post-Robert leaving the house, there was a version [that ended there]. We really wanted to fight to keep Rishi’s wife’s death, the scene with Yasmin and the boat hand, all of this stuff that felt very shocking but also very revelatory of character.
That [scene with Yasmin and the woman who worked on her father’s boat] is one of the strongest scenes in the whole season, actually. We never explicitly came down very hard as the creators about what specifically that abuse was, in terms of like, this moment happened at this point. It was more latent, creeping dread about the sexualization of her through her father’s eyes, the inappropriateness of all of the stuff that she’s seen.
Alondra (Angela Sant’Albano), the deckhand who becomes her assistant, put it forward to her in the finale: “Your father was actually a predator. There were all these underaged girls on the boat. This definitely happened to you, whether you acknowledge it or not.” Yasmin’s reaction there and the violence of it and the violence of how she wants that woman who has shown the truth to her to basically get fucked off by the butler, all of that speaks to something which is just truly terrible. Maybe she doesn’t have the memory of it, but certainly for us as creators it exists and maybe bears more exploration.
Down: There’s actually a very horrible line in one of the flashbacks when Yasmin and her father are hugging and he obviously is coked up and she’s just seen him engage in a sex act. They’re hugging and she says, “You’re still hard.” Horrific line. There was some resistance on Marisa’s part to the way it was played. She was like, “If I felt that, I would push him away immediately.” I don’t know what the right word is, but there’s a realization or weird sense memory of something bad there.
Kay: We talked about that line a lot when it went in. I think you very correctly made the case for its inclusion because it speaks to a memory or it speaks to something. It feels unnatural, but that unnaturalness is the point, right?
To go from hugging the woman Alondra to then walking out and firing her is shocking. But that’s who she is, really. That’s the way she has acted in all her relationships.
Down: It was one of my favorite bits of the season. Yasmin and the decisions she made in the last couple of episodes just cut to the core of who she really is, a survivor and someone that really, at this point, realizes that the only person that is going to take care of her, I’m not talking monetarily, is herself. That’s just an instinct she has and I think it’s an instinct she’s going to lean into going forward. When she’s hugging Alondra, that’s the last moment for her where she thinks, “Okay, I’m still the young girl who may have suffered that kind of abuse.” And then it’s like, “I’m pushing that part of myself away. I’m back in this really nice house, this gilded cage to a certain extent, and I’m just hardening up totally. I’m not going to invite this woman into my life and create a relationship with her. I’m just going to just cut her out.” I think that’s basically what she’s been doing to that memory of her father.
Kay: That’s one of my favorite scenes in the whole of season. It feels like a concentrated 90, 120 second version of the whole story basically.
She could have just immediately said go away, but she does hug Alondra back.
Kay: She needs that realization. Then when someone’s shown her the mirror, she’s like, “Oh, fucking hell, that’s the reflection. Get away from me.” She still needs that moment of closure, realization, whatever it is.
Maybe it speaks to what we expect from TV that you really think she’s going to be with Robert. You expect the sentimental thing that we’re accustomed to seeing, and that’s not what she is. But she does play a sleight of hand as well, obviously Robert was pretty surprised. Beyond the money, what do you think she likes about Henry?
Down: Look, the money is good, the security is good. I do actually think she’s much more similar to Henry than she is to Robert. That little sojourn for his tech interview really illuminates that they’re actually not very similar at all and that they’ve been brought together through circumstance. They’re brought together because they work together. Having an illicit, look-over-the-shoulder, flirty relationship in an office and living together as roommates is not the same as a sustained relationship in the real world. Henry is firstly who she thinks she should be with because of her status and money, her background, and all that stuff. It’s also thinking this is the world I’ve inhabited my entire life and Robert just doesn’t fit in it.
During the proposal scene when she’s talking to Henry and she asks, “Do you love me?” And he says, “I don’t know.” He’s being honest there. He asks back and she’s very quick to be like, “Yes, I do.” I don’t think that’s her being totally cynical. Her version of love is all the things she says. “I need someone that is going to look after me, that I can have a partnership with, that I can feel like we’re companions.”
Kay: We had some very on the nose lines in episode 7, which we ended up cutting for length. We had a scene where after they check out of the hotel when she notices the Libra tattoo [on the woman who works at the hotel] and there was a walk and talk to the car with Robert calling her out for being rude and a class snob about this woman who was serving them in the hotel. He basically says in dialogue, “You’ve never seen me outside of Pierpoint’s four walls.”
It was a real acknowledgement in the show, and maybe a big theme of the show that their relationship was based on the fiction of work. It’s based on, “We all go to jobs every day, we meet people and we spend more time with them then with our families.” But there’s a real sense of role play when you go into work versus when you’re at home. Robert effectively said in dialogue, “You don’t know me at all.” We ended up cutting it for length, but maybe it was a little bit too on the nose.
When she’s at Henry’s home, his uncle is so warm to her and welcoming in a way that seems like she isn’t used to.
Down: Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), Henry’s uncle, says to her, “None of that’s your fault” and he just hugs her. She’s really taken aback by that. She’s not somebody that has a great family life. She’s got this horrific father. She’s got a mother who’s out the picture, doesn’t give a fuck about her. She has had this series of nannies that’s raised her, taught her every language under the sun, but she probably hasn’t got a lasting relationship with any of them. Now she’s being welcomed into a very powerful family that’s very close-knit and protective of one another. I think that’s seductive.
Kay: I would say one of the core parts of our writing is to try and subvert expectations around how characters act. In some ways, Lord Norton is the epicenter of an absolute power. He’s a mogul. He is Rupert Murdoch, he’s all these things. There is a darkness to the very enterprise in which he finds himself, in the power that he has over people’s lives.
We love the idea that grace and acceptance, those moments are so fleeting. Where the hell do they come from in life? You don’t know where that is going to come from. It might not come from your father, it might come from a co-worker or a boss. That was to us, truly surprising that she could be in that environment with that man in that huge house alone and he could just absolve her in a way. Obviously, the sins of a father are encoded into her DNA and she can never be truly free of them. She’s never going to escape that stuff. But he could give her that moment in the front room where he says, “Actually, this has got nothing to do with you.”
Do you think, fully separate of the money, she sees Henry’s pedigree as cleansing her public shame?
Down: A hundred percent. There’s a little line when she’s talking to Harper (Myha’la) on the phone in the finale where Harper’s looking at the magazine spread. She says, “You control the copy?” And Yasmin says, “Of course we did.” It’s like I can now basically reshape myself and my public enemies through the power and the instrument Henry’s family has to do that.
Of all Yasmin’s friendships and relationships, which do you think is the closest to being real?
Down: At the start, her relationship with Henry was relationship that you had with the client. Which was to make them feel good about themselves, stroke their ego, make them feel like the most important intelligent person in the world. But I think there’s a turning point in episode 3, when she’s shouting at him and saying, “I was here as an employee, don’t make me feel uncomfortable.” She’s honest with him. Then they had this moment in the pool where he’s very honest with her about his father’s suicide, what it did to him, how it made him feel about his own ambition. That’s when she starts to think, god, maybe this is someone I can actually have an honest relationship with.
Kay: Part of the truth of the show is after three seasons of watching these characters all bump up against each other like pin balls, fundamentally their most important relationships, to their detriment, are their relationships to themselves.
Their own sense of self, their own sense of their own personal history, their own sense of their own ambition, narcissism, isolation, self-advancement and how that basically fucks all of their relationships. In a way, there are moments of truth everywhere for Yasmin, moments of truth in Harper, moments of truth to Rob, and then they go back into themselves. Whether it’s through self-interest, self-preservation, self-hate, all of these things, it prevents some major breakthrough and some fundamental loyalty to each other.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Adrienne Gaffney is a features editor at ELLE and previously worked at WSJ Magazine and Vanity Fair.