Shocking ‘Industry’ Twist Began with ‘Coke and Boats’ Email to HBO
[Editor’s note: This story contains spoilers for “Industry” Season 3, Episode 6, “Nikki Beach, or: So Many Ways to Lose.”]
It is the most dramatic and arguably most consequential moment in the three seasons of HBO‘s “Industry.” During a heated argument with his daughter Yasmin (Marisa Abela), the disgraced book publisher Charles Hanani (Adam Levy) leaps from his yacht into the Mediterranean. His daughter decides not throw the buoy and save him, instead confiding in her friend Harper (Myha’la) to cover her tracks.
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To shoot the pivotal Episode 6 scene, director Isabella Ekl?f cleared the deck, leaving only four crew members on set, and shuttling between above-and-below deck herself to give the actors space. According to Ekl?f, the two key moments of decision — Charles to jump, Yasmin not throwing the buoy– were surprisingly easy for both Abela and Levy to find dramatically, only requiring three takes of each.
After the father-daughter unload, saying the most brutal and brutally honest things imaginable to one another, Levy, a well-established theater actor, saw the moment from his character’s perspective as a piece of theater, with Charles jumping as his moment to play the martyr.
“I was quickly able to find the motivation,” said Levy. “Charles is theatrical. It’s a vitriolic moment for him, before going in the water it was actually liberating. I think the trickiness was actually the intimate scenes on the boat with my daughter.”
Ekl?f had one big note for Levy, which the actor agrees was the key to unlocking any villains he’s ever played.
“I’ve worked with male narcissists and psychopath [characters] in almost every single thing I’ve done, it’s always the same problem,” said Ekl?f. “They have a hard time defending the character, because they think they’re supposed to play a stereotype. I always have to convince the guys who play rapists and bad guys that they need to have sympathy with this guy, otherwise it’s not going to work.”
According to Ekl?f, the shoot as a whole was incredibly taxing on the two actors, as it was a scene that required a great deal of coverage and different angles, requiring Levy and Abela to have to reach fo the heightened physicality and drama of the screaming argument a number of different times, shot from different angle. According to the director, Abela at one point on the boat shoot lost her voice for three days from all the yelliing, but Ekl?f was also clear that emotionally the actress had little difficulty locating her character’s dramatic moment on inaction.
“For Marisa, it wasn’t hard for her at all to find it. She’s very, very talented,” said Ekl?f. “I think maybe it is kind of accessible for most women. Most women have had that feeling through life of butting their head against a stone wall of privilege, so I think it’s easily accessible.”
According to Abela, the way the writing built toward the moment, her character’s motivation was clear, and there was one moment in particular she saw a point of no return.
“I think it comes from the fact that when he pulls her into the hug, that she can feel him [Charles is still erect], I think that is a trigger for her because of her past. She sees red,” said Abela. “Hearing this sort of barrage of hatred from him, I do really think in that moment she wants to never see or think or hear from him again.”
In breaking down what immediately happens after Charles jumps, and her character’s decision to not act, Abela told IndieWire she analyzed the moment from three different perspectives, asking her the following: Is it a shock that he jumped? Is it an active decision? Is it negligence or even murder?
“I think for me as an actor, I think that there are stages of this that need to register [for this] to make sense. The first one is shock that he’s actually done it [jumped], that kind of leads to inertia, a physical inability to move,” said Abela. “And then a very short window of a decision being made, or at least the understanding that she could make a decision here to not do anything, and then panic. There’s three technical stages of that experience. I think if someone said, ‘Do you want a rewind button right now?’ after she’s seeing him [float] into the distance, she would say, ‘Yes.’ I don’t think it’s cold blooded murder.”
For Abela the Episode 6 fireworks are the punctuation of how the season has unfolded, with various flashbacks to the boat layered throughout the previous episodes.
“The flashbacks throughout the season punctuates how we filmed it. Each moment leads into the next,” said Abela. “Seeing him in her room on her bed [having sex with his young employee in Episode 1]. He’s brought her here, but he’s in lots of trouble, so he’s implicating her. There’s so much power abuse at the beginning of this [season] when it comes to her father because he knows that she’s completely financially dependent on him.”
The “Industry” creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay agree with Abela, and view the payoff in Episode 6 as an example of how in Season 3 the former investors-turned-TV writers finally got the hang of how to structure the arc of a season of TV. It started when they sat down to write the first episode of the season, making the realization they needed to start on the boat, dropping the audience into Yasmin’s perspective of navigating Charles’ debachorous world of drugs and young women.
“We [realized we] have to drop people in, really feel the weight of her father and his influence on her [early on],” said Downs. “So we sent an email to HBO entitled ‘coke and boats,’ and said, ‘do you want to do this — our idea for showing these flashbacks’ — and they really like it.”
Added Kay, “We had to [convince] a few of the producers, because they were like, ‘Why don’t you just front load this, why are you parceling out over the season? Why are you keeping Harper’s revelation on the boat to the end of [Episode] 2? And we actually felt emotionally that those scenes were going to have way more impact the way we doled them out. I think Episode 6 is one of the more successful episodes of the season in terms of how it clicks everything into focus.”
One of the late story adjustments was deciding to put Harper (Myha’la) on the boat, which leads to her helping Yasmin. Abela loved what the episode revealed about Harper’s character, juxtaposed to the two characters blow-out fight at the end of the episode — Yasmin infuriated Harper used her at work for her own gain, knowing she was particularly vulnerable. The contradiction saying everything about how transactional relationships are on “Industry.”
“[Harper] would literally bury a body with her if she needed to,” said Abela, referencing Harper helping Yasmin after Charles jumps. “But if Yasmin asks her to forfeit her climbing the professional ranks, that’s where she draws the line. It’s insane, but that’s the way it is.”
“Industry” releases new episodes weekly at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
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