When Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were preparing to graduate from Oxford, where they met, they both felt pressure to get a high-paying salary job. "Mickey's mother is Ghanaian and my mother is Polish," Kay says from his home near the London suburb of Wimbledon. "So the moment you leave university, you need to figure out how to make the most money as quickly as you can."
Armed with degrees in theology (Down) and literature (Kay), they landed lucrative investment-banking jobs, which neither of them embraced. "I worked out pretty quickly that I was really ill-suited to it," says Down, who lasted just over a year. "None of us were really qualified to talk about any of the stuff that we ended up bullshitting about," says Kay, who endured just under three years.
But the pair did walk away from their jobs with enough intel to cocreate HBO's sexy workplace saga Industry, in which partying postgrads claw their way up the food chain at a London investment bank. The show's second season, which jumps three years ahead in the story, is now unfurling. Down and Kay admit they could have used a screenwriting primer before embarking on the first season.
"When you start to read about a formula for something that you think is a creative endeavor," Kay says, "as a young person you think, 'Well, Mickey and I will be different — we'll do it our own way.'"
"We didn't really know what we were doing," Down admits. "We'd barely been in writers' rooms."
The production has been a Venn diagram of U.K. and U.S. influences, Down says. Season one saw a big U.K. influence on the writers' room, which meant that a small team spent "something like three weeks" working out the season's plotlines. For season two, a beefed- up staff got twelve weeks to break stories and write. "We had a proper, full-blown American- style writers' room," Kay says. "And I think the show has benefited enormously from it."
Kay adds, "The thing Mickey and I are most proud of is the lessons we learned from season one and how we put them into practice in season two."
"I think season one was great," Down says. "But it was eight hours of vibe and character, fun and style. This time it's all those things as well — but with a story.”
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #8, 2022, under the title, "Bank Job."
