‘Industry’’s Kit Harington Would Play Henry Muck Again

This story contains major spoilers for the season four finale of HBO’s Industry, “Both, And.”

It’s the end of the road for Sir Henry Muck. In season four of HBO’s Industry, Yasmin’s husband has embarked on an Icarus-like flight of redemption, joining the splashy fintech banking company Tender as its new CEO, only to discover that Tender’s founder, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), has made him the face of a company that barely exists. Tender’s earnings are inflated, based on bogus acquisitions; the thing, as Henry and other characters learn over the course of the season, is nothing.

In “Both, And,” Industry‘s season four finale, Henry comes crashing down to Earth. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) tells him they’re done; Whitney reveals to him that there’s Russian state interest in Tender, which puts both of them in considerable danger. Faced with the choice of giving up his identity as a British aristocrat in order to escape with Whitney, Henry chooses to stay and face the music, becoming the fall guy for Tender’s sins.

However, in typical Industry fashion, things aren’t as bad as they initially seem for the upper class; in Henry’s final moments in the finale, he’s once again a well-medicated gentleman of leisure, and seems perfectly content in his gilded cage. It’s a fitting end for a character played wonderfully all season by Kit Harington, whose performance as Muck is a reminder of why so many people fell in love with the actor in that other splashy HBO Sunday show all those years ago.

In the wake of “Both/And,” GQ sat down with Harington to talk about the Oedipal aspects of Henry’s arc this season, how Whitney managed to exploit him, if he thinks he’ll come back for the show’s recently-announced fifth (and final) season, and much more.

GQ: What were your first reactions upon learning Henry’s arc for the season?

Kit Harington: I got the soft pitch from [Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay] just before season four, but it wasn’t a given that I was coming back, because it’s never a given to them that they’ve got another season [laughs]. They gave me the sort of rough outline of, We think we’re going to bring in this character who is a real con man. They said they wanted to take Henry from a place where he’s down and out after being a Tory politician, failing up to the high highs, and then down. I thought it was an interesting idea to really put him through the wringer. They said that they were going to throw everything at me and take him through addiction and out [of it], and all of that stuff. I knew at the end of season three he revealed himself as an addict, and I thought there was more to tell there about his story, and more for me to investigate as an actor.

Was there one specific thing you felt like you wanted to explore more of, or that you felt the character had more to say in general?

I thought that the idea of this other character, Max’s character, was interesting, because of the way that they said that he’s going to sort of become romantically but not romantically involved with him. Number one, I felt like the story with Marisa—with Yasmin—was going to be fascinating, watching their marriage collapse, because there’s no way those two are going to have it happen; it’s going to [laughs] be chaos. And I thought, That’s brilliant, to investigate a marriage that’s just crumbling. And I’ve had fun with Marisa up until that point, but I felt that there was so much more that we could play with. And then, this other character who [Henry’s] sort of slowly being enraptured by, I thought that kind of even from the get-go, there was a sort of parental thing for this childlike character with this mommy and daddy types that he’s circling. He’s always sort of treated her—even in season three, she’s a strangely maternal presence to him. I wanted to look at that. And then going into his backstory. I mean, that’s a very broad answer, but it was the idea of him being thrown between these two people.

I think that Henry assumed, stupidly, that he was in control. He’s not listening to her, he’s not paying attention to who she is and what she wants. You can see that from the final scene, the breakup scene between them—he says We were going to have kids and she’s like, I never said I wanted that. She has said to him, in that proposal [scene], I want a partnership; I want it all. And he has gone, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking [that] partnership, in his world, [means] that she’s going to be a mother and run the estate, and he’s going to go off and be the big-business type. He doesn’t pay attention to what she’s telling him and what she wants, which is to be more than that. She’s always wanted to be more.

The scenes between you and Marisa feel like these great tennis matches, where you’re both volleying back and forth. From a process standpoint, how do you two prepare for these sequences?

The scenes are beautifully written, and they have peaks and troughs, nuances, all of that. I think it’s making sure you find—cause they’re long scenes sometimes. The beginning scene in episode seven is actually a very lengthy scene, where one minute they’re shouting at each other, the next minute he’s pleading, the next minute she’s acquiescing, apparently. It’s making sure you go through the scene, and you see exactly where those beats and drops are. Otherwise, it just becomes one shouting match or one sobbing match. It’s not interesting, it’s not realistic, it’s not true. And also, it’s looking at certain scenes. There’s a world in which he comes off the plane [in the finale] as she’s throwing him under the bus and he’s fucking furious.

But we’ve seen them be furious; we’re beyond that. It’s actually—and it’s not written like that—but it was very important to me and Marisa, all the way through right until the end, that where we can, within this toxic relationship, we show the love that they have for each other, which is still there up until the point she says, “I don’t love you anymore.” But a moment ago, you’ve seen her crying on the steps that she’s done [with] this.