Industry Creators Talk How Season 4 Is a “Completely Different Show” from Earlier Seasons

The hit financial drama Industry is back, but the game has completely changed. With the fourth season now on air, the show’s creators have described this new chapter as a “corporate thriller” that feels like a different program entirely compared to its first three seasons. The familiar world of Pierpoint & Co. is gone, sold off at the end of last season, forcing characters like Harper Stern and Yasmin Kara-Hanani to navigate a new, treacherous landscape of global finance.

A New Playground: From the Trading Floor to a Global Game

The most dramatic shift for Season 4 is the setting. The show has left the iconic trading floor of Pierpoint behind, a move creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay say was “freeing”. This destruction of their main setting allowed them to expand the story into a much broader world.

“We wanted the show to centre on a global story with more stakeholders,” Down and Kay explained, promising “broader scope. Higher stakes. Deeper, more intricate storytelling.”

The new season is a globetrotting adventure, with the action moving between locations like Paris, Ghana, New York, and Sunderland. The central pivot for this expansion is Tender, a splashy and somewhat shady payment processing company that bursts onto the London financial scene. Tender’s ambition to become an all-in-one “bank in your pocket” draws in nearly every major character, putting them on opposing sides of a high-stakes financial battle.

Harper and Yasmin: A Friendship Tested by Professional War

While the scenery has changed, the core dynamic between Myha’la’s Harper and Marisa Abela’s Yasmin remains the show’s “beating heart”. However, their twisted friendship is under new strain as they find themselves on opposite sides of the fight over Tender’s future.

At the start of the season, Harper is working at Otto Mostyn’s fund but feels managed and squeezed out, eager for a way to reclaim control. Yasmin is now married to Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington), navigating a complex relationship while trying to establish her own professional worth. Their paths converge on Tender, with one’s success meaning the other’s failure.

“This season really is about pitting them against each other in a professional sense, and whether their friendship can endure that,” said Mickey Down. “It really is about Harper being on one side of a transactional trade and Yasmin being on the other.”

Introducing a New Kind of Villain: The Enigmatic Whitney Halberstram

A major new force driving the season is Max Minghella’s Whitney Halberstram, the enigmatic CFO and co-founder of Tender. The creators designed Whitney to be an elusive figure whose motivations are slowly revealed.

“He’s somewhat of an abstraction by design, and it feels like you can’t quite place him,” said Down. “As in every good horror film, if you show too much of the monster it feels less scary. It’s way more interesting to drip feed the monster and his motivations.”

Whitney represents a new kind of threat that wouldn’t have fit within the old Pierpoint hierarchy. His company, Tender, acts as a metaphor for his own psyche—constantly on the knife’s edge between huge success and total failure. His arrival pulls both Harper and Yasmin into his orbit, further complicating their already strained relationship.

A Shift in Genre: Entering “Proper Thriller Mode”

The creators have been open about their intention to shift the show’s tone for this season. They cite inspirations like the legal thriller Michael Clayton and the work of director Michael Mann, aiming for a more intense, cinematic feel.

“All of that has the makings of a good thriller, so it felt like a natural progression of the show at this time,” said Down about the show’s existing elements of urgency and survival.

This “proper thriller mode” is evident in the heightened stakes and the cat-and-mouse narrative that unfolds around Tender’s questionable business practices and the political forces trying to regulate it. The season tackles themes of fraud, populism in Europe, and the interdependence of finance, media, and politics.

New Faces and Expanded Worlds

With the larger scope comes a significantly expanded cast. New characters are introduced to populate this wider financial universe, including:

• Kal Penn as Jay Jonah Atterbury, Tender’s CEO.
• Kiernan Shipka as Hayley Clay, an executive assistant at Tender.
• Charlie Heaton as Jim Dycker, a financial journalist hunting for a story.
• Toheeb Jimoh as Kwabena Bannerman, a trader at Mostyn Asset Management.
• Amy James-Kelly as Jennifer Bevan, a new Junior Minister in the Labour government.

The creators note that this season features over 150 speaking parts, making it feel like a full universe compared to the more focused earlier seasons. This expansion allows the show to explore power dynamics from fresh angles, including through the lens of journalism and government regulation.

The production itself changed to match this new scale. The team shot on location across the world, often with a “guerilla feeling,” using real people instead of background actors in places like Canary Wharf to enhance authenticity. The intense schedule sometimes required shooting up to nine pages a day, a pace considered very fast for television.

For fans of the show’s signature rapid-fire dialogue and high-pressure drama, these elements remain. But they are now deployed in service of a faster, more expansive plot that the creators confidently state makes Season 4 a distinct and evolved entry in the Industry saga. The personal betrayals and desperate ambitions are all still there, but the board on which this game is played is now the entire world.

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