The creators of Industry have explained how real life events led to the “organic” arc of Yasmin becoming a Ghislaine Maxwell-type figure in the show.
In the fourth season finale, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) hosts a fundraiser for right-wing politician Sebastian Stefanowicz (Robert Holcroft), for which she hires young escorts.
The scenario has echoes of Maxwell, who was convicted in 2022 for sex trafficking offenses, cultivating a network of powerful elites alongside fellow convict Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. Their actions are the subject of the highly publicised Epstein Files, which details their interactions with powerful figures.
The creators of the show, Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, spoke on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast about how real life inspired the events of the series.
“With Yasmin, as beautifully played by Marisa in the first season, she was afraid of her own shadow, constantly softly stepping around, fucking up the lunch order, a bit of a wallflower,” said Kay. “And where we leave her in Season four, we just thought it was radical storytelling. It was a journey that we knew Marisa had the chops to play, and we thought that it was earned in the sense of her relationship to her own trauma.”
He continued: “Because the show is contemporaneous, we pull stuff from what we’re feeling about the world, and as we were writing about the fraud element of it, there was the political element of it. It was very hard to write a season about money and politics, when we were writing it, that didn’t have some version of the ascendant face of autocracy and right-wing politics. It’s impossible to ignore on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s come to fruition horribly in the US, and it’s the rising force in the UK.”
He concluded: “So, who was it from our universe that would be most susceptible to that kind of messaging, or who would find the seductions of the power offered by that the most compelling? And Yasmin felt like the site of all of that stuff for us. It felt very organic to us.”
Industry has been renewed for a fifth and final season. Recently, Kay and Down argued that “finance bros” miss the point of the show.
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