If Konrad Kay hadn’t gotten let go from his job at Morgan Stanley in 2013, he and Mickey Down might never have co-created HBO’s exquisite Industry. The showrunners of the druggy, lustful investment banking drama met at Oxford University in 2007.
“We were ostensibly at a very, very good university, but we didn’t do much work,” Down tells MovieMaker. “We did watch a lot of films and I guess cultivated a shared taste, which was very helpful down the line.”
After school, both went into finance. By the time Kay’s position at his job was made redundant — “the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says — Down had left finance to work at a talent agency, and made a short film that caught NBC’s attention and earned him an agent.
“At that point, he was like, ‘Well, why don’t we write together?’” Kay recalls. “So we spent a weekend together and wrote a very bad banking drama that had a little bit of what ended up in Industry, but really just was just to see if we could write together — and we didn’t want to tear each other’s head off.”
Soon, they made the 2014 feature film Gregor, which they funded through a Kickstarter campaign. It included a YouTube video of them pretending to pitch the idea to HBO — which, years later, became the home of Industry.
Also Read: On Industry, Gen Z Trades on the End of the World
Gregor got attention at UK festivals, and they began to get small television gigs. After more than 100 general meetings, they were hired by TV production company Bad Wolf to write a movie. Bad Wolf CEO and co-founder Jane Tranter, the former head of fiction at BBC and an executive producer on HBO’s media conglomerate drama Succession, suggested they write about banking.
“We were like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be really hackneyed and boring. Everybody knows what finance is like on screen.’ And then she was like, ‘But you’ve got to write it with the kind of wide-eyed impressionism of first-year graduates, because that’s where you guys were. So write it from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. Maybe there’s a show in there,” Kay recalls.
She was right.
More About Industry From Konrad Kay and Mickey Down
In 2016, HBO gave them a two-script deal for Industry, and they spent the next few years developing it. They finally got the series green lit in January 2019. Premiering in 2020 to much acclaim, it stars Myha’la, Marisa Abela, and Harry Lawtey as a group of recent grads competing at the fictional London investment bank, Pierpoint.
Down and Kay are the first to admit that their journey to running their own show would be difficult, if not impossible, to pull off today.
“We were very inexperienced. I would throw our hands up and say that,” Down adds. “We did a lot of drafts of the first couple episodes. We had to figure out how to essentially write eight hours of story without having done it before.”
“Let’s put it this way,” adds Kay. “There was more of an appetite for experimentation at that exact point. … I don’t mind saying this now because we’ve cut our teeth a little bit more and we’ve learned and we’ve professionalized ourselves as writers. But we were really under qualified in that first season. And that, in a way, I think actually shows in the work in quite an interesting way.”
Industry Season 3 premieres August 11 on HBO.
Main Image: (L-R) Konrad Kay and Mickey Down behind the scenes of Industry courtesy of HBO, photo by Nick Strasburg
A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2024 print issue of MovieMaker Magazine.