‘Industry’s Harry Lawtey breaks down Robert’s ayahuasca trip: ‘This is a big swing’

Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) goes through the ringer in virtually every episode of Industry. Remember when his lover/abuser/Oedipal mother figure Nicole Craig (Sarah Parish) died beside him in the Season 3 premiere? Or his fistfight with Lumi CEO Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) in the very next episode?

While Season 3, episode 4 of Industry offered Robert a brief respite from emotional trauma, instead raining down hell on Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), episode 5, titled “Company Man,” throws Robert into a meat grinder of political, professional, and personal anxieties. Pierpoint & Co. sends him as their representative to the select committee investigating the British government’s bailout of Lumi.

Nothing more than a pawn in Pierpoint’s fight with Henry and his own powerful allies, Robert is forced to evaluate his position at the investment bank — especially after learning that his boss Eric Tao (Ken Leung) called him “expendable.” As if that wasn’t enough, Robert’s also still reckoning with his romantic feelings for coworker and friend Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), who’s in a relationship with Henry. It’s all a very tangled web, one whose threads intertwine in a surreal sequence toward the end of the episode, when Robert takes ayahuasca with Henry. In a first for Industry — a show already rife with scenes of substance use — we witness Robert’s trip firsthand, which brings us through a nightmarish take on the Pierpoint trading floor and Robert’s own rundown house.

“I remember saying to the writers, ‘This is a big swing,'” Lawtey told Mashable when discussing his first reactions to reading about Robert’s trip in the “Company Man” script. “This is certainly a tonal shift for the show, and I think it may come as a surprise to people who’ve been with us from the beginning, but I think that’s a great thing. It’s nice to be part of a project that is creatively evolving rather than just staying in the same place. Of course, we still pay homage to the same themes and ideas, but we’re putting them into different shapes.”

Among these themes and ideas are Robert’s many insecurities, which get a drug-fueled remix here. Anxieties about his working-class background surface in the appearance of a shoeshiner at Pierpoint, and in Henry’s breathless laughter at Robert’s expense (which could also double as mockery over Robert’s feelings for Yasmin). Meanwhile, his mommy issues pop up in a vision of Nicole, who stands in his kitchen, hoists up her skirt, and lets liquid run down her legs and cascade to the floor, an action which mirrors everything from Henry and Yasmin’s earlier urine play to Robert’s leaky ceiling to a pregnant woman’s water breaking. The accompanying sound of a baby crying lends extra weight to the latter interpretation, especially as the next stage of the trip brings Robert face to face with an image of his mother projected in heavenly white on a massive screen at Pierpoint.

I remember saying to the writers, ‘This is a big swing.’

Perhaps the biggest worry on display here is Robert’s own relationship with Pierpoint. The whole trip opens with Robert in the Pierpoint bathroom, staring up at the word “wanker” scrawled on the ceiling. It’s right where grad Hari Dhar (Nabhaan Rizwan) was before he died in Industry’s very first episode. Will Robert reach a similar fate if he stays a company man? Based on Eric’s neck-slicing motion later in the trip (paired perfectly with his Henry VIII Halloween costume), Robert’s subconscious certainly seems to think so. And since the trip is about “searching for some kind of existential freedom and liberation,” as Lawtey put it, could this be Robert’s subconscious telling him to free himself from Pierpoint entirely?

Harry Lawtey in “Industry.”
Credit: Nick Strasburg / HBO

Robert is a silent searcher throughout it all, reacting sometimes with horror, sometimes with awe. And while Lawtey is no stranger to playing a character who’s under the influence — think back to all of Robert’s wild partying in Season 1 — this trip scene is unlike anything he, or anyone else, has done on Industry.

“W​​hen you’re playing a substance-induced experience like that, you don’t want it to feel generalized or clichéd,” Lawtey said. “By its nature, the way the show covers it is quite abstract and quite lyrical, almost dreamlike. If the tone is doing that for you, you don’t want to lean into that too much as the actor, you want it to feel grounded and genuine. So that was a challenge as well.”

Another challenge? Shooting the trip sequence on the Pierpoint trading floor, where every screen is lit up with a key Robert scene from prior seasons of Industry. Look closely and you’ll catch the moment where he finds Hari’s dead body, or his RIF day speech from the Season 1 finale. For Lawtey, who doesn’t like watching his own performances and therefore hasn’t seen any of Industry, filming that moment was “bizarre.”

“It was my own personal hellscape to walk into a room that’s just flooded with solely me and scenes that I shot five years ago,” Lawtey said. “But it very much lent itself to the moment, because I think Robert is supposed to be pretty terrified of that kind of vision.”

He added, joking: “[Showrunners] Mickey [Down] and Konrad [Kay] know that I don’t watch Industry — much to their frustration sometimes — so I think they took a specific pleasure in just forcing me to see 200 versions of myself.”

Marisa Abela and Harry Lawtey in “Industry.”
Credit: Nick Strasburg / HBO

Amid all the screens and nods to earlier Industry episodes, another image in the trip stands out: The words “eat it” scrolling by on the Pierpoint ticker display, a reference to a Season 1 moment when Yasmin made Robert eat his own ejaculate off of a mirror. The phrase’s appearance here is a pointed reminder to how the relationship between the two — now roommates — began.

“That [initial] dynamic between them was entirely fostered on this very status-oriented kink relationship, which Robert was very willing and consenting to,” Lawtey said. “But he was purposely moving himself into a position of inferiority in relation to Yasmin, which is subtly related to his ideas of her from the class perspective. So much about his attraction to Yasmin is built around his aspirational desire to transcend his own class. To shake that off and realize how toxic that may have been for his own self-esteem is a big part of Robert’s journey, and a big part of [his and Yasmin’s] connection as two characters. In the final episodes of this season, we realize there may be more substance to their care for one another once you remove all that baggage.”

Robert’s baggage in relation to Yasmin may not be the only weight his trip alleviated. For starters, he decides to sell his crumbling old house. And as he returns home at the end of the episode, he seems lighter, more aware of who he is beyond his insecurities. Despite Henry’s post-trip warning not to, Robert is able to look at himself in the mirror and even muster a smile. Perhaps, for once in this episode, he likes who he sees.

Industry Season 3 is now streaming on Max, with new episodes premiering Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.