Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, the Finance Bros Behind HBO’s “Industry”

The godmother of “Industry” is Jane Tranter, a powerful executive producer who has worked in both the U.K. and Hollywood. In the early twenty-tens, Tranter had the idea of making a show about newcomers to the City of London. “I could not work out why young people, after the whole credit crunch and everything that had happened with the banks, were still flocking in their hordes to go and work in the City,” she told me. “Wasn’t this the generation that was meant to be saving the world from the atrocious mistakes of my generation?” (One bleak data point in Tranter’s research file was the death of a young intern, in 2013, who worked at a bank in London; he suffered a seizure after working three nights in a row without sleep. In the pilot of “Industry,” a trainee expires under similar circumstances.) Tranter secured a modest budget from HBO to explore the idea, with the directive, she told me, to “just make it young and sexy somehow.” By chance, a colleague had met Down and Kay while discussing a different project, a psychological thriller, and steered them to Tranter. “They were so bright and so personable, and they had exactly what you want when you are tackling something like this,” Tranter told me. “They both had authenticity, and they had objectivity and clarity. But they also had scores to settle.”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

On set, the pair work together seamlessly—so much so that the cast and crew refer to them by the moniker M.K. The actor Ken Leung, who plays Eric Tao, a veteran trader, told me, “I almost never think of one without the other. You wouldn’t want to talk to one about something without the other knowing. It would feel wrong.” (One instance of score-settling: a scene in which Eric undresses in front of underlings is based on the behavior of a former senior colleague of Kay’s, who would summon him to his office on a Friday afternoon to talk about the week’s business, all the while stripping down to his underwear before putting on his weekend clothes.) When Down and Kay do interviews together, they regularly finish each other’s sentences. Tranter told me, “I often think, if they both get on their phones during a meeting, or on set, that they are texting each other.”

The two men’s temperaments are very different. Down overflows with ebullient confidence, whereas Kay is more anxious and cerebral. Myha’la told me, “Mickey feels very like a superstar—kind of flashy, like an old-school director. I know for a fact that he really badly wants to be on the Director Fits Instagram account, where they say, ‘Look at this great director, and look at his awesome outfit.’ And then, with Konrad, I feel like I have seen his heart blossom in real time this season. He gets such a twinkle in his eye, and a chaotic excitement, when he is, like, ‘Let’s try this.’ ” She went on, “They’re no longer holding on to anything so tightly, and they are really eager to let us play with them, because of the trust that’s been built.” Their own ambitions are unabashedly large. “I like reading biographies of John Boorman and David Lean and all these great directors,” Kay told me. “Sometimes I think I won’t be satisfied until I can see Mickey on a hilltop overseeing, like, fifteen hundred extras, through a megaphone, directing a big, two-and-a-half-hour-long period epic.” He continued, “It’s, like, someone is detonating something, and Mickey is saying, ‘We missed that by thirty seconds,’ and the whole shot costs another hundred and twenty grand. That excites me.”

Down and Kay met in 2007. Down had just arrived at Oxford for his first year, and Kay was a second-year student. Down recalled that Kay was playing foosball: “I sidled up to him, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re new—you’re going to fucking hate it here.’ ” They were both members of Regent’s Park College, which enrolls a high proportion of divinity students. Both had been bounced there after being rejected by older and more prestigious Oxford colleges. Kay blew his interview at his first choice by holding forth about Homeric allusions in “Ulysses,” despite never having read the book. “I fucked up so badly I cried afterward,” he told me. Both arrived at Oxford with the insouciance of privilege, having been privately educated at exclusive institutions, Down at Charterhouse School (Thackeray, Vaughan Williams) and Kay at King’s College School, Wimbledon (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Sickert). Down studied theology; he had applied for the subject because he knew it was statistically much easier to get into Oxford as a theologian than as a historian, his true interest. (Robert Spearing has leveraged a similar application tactic in “Industry.”) Kay studied English literature, favoring modules on sparse modernist poetry to ones on lengthy Victorian novels. Both did the minimum of academic work. Down tried his hand at acting, without great success. “One play was just a disaster—it was Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ and on the first night I got the cue wrong, and we skipped about forty minutes of the play,” he told me. Mostly, the two went out.

Entering the television or film industry at the bottom rung, or trying to launch a career as a writer, wasn’t a realistic proposition for either man upon graduation. Down’s parents, who are partners in their own architectural practice, in North London, urged him to enter a steady profession such as the law. He had done a summer internship at the Home Office, and he was invited to apply for the intelligence services. Down, whose mother is Ghanaian and whose father is white British, said, “There was a diversity ‘fast stream.’ I got to the meeting and we were all Black or brown people. I thought, That’s interesting.” But he didn’t get the job. Not knowing what else to do, he successfully applied for a summer internship at Morgan Stanley, and after it ended he went to Rothschild. Élite financial institutions in the U.K. recruit from half a dozen similarly élite universities and, traditionally, have accepted a significant number of humanities grads, many of whom have never taken an economics class. Of course, not all jobs in finance require math skills: Anraj Rayat, a close friend of Kay’s, who works as a sales trader at Barclays and was an inspiration for the confrontational, scabrous character of Rishi Ramdani in “Industry,” told me, “There’s a job called prime brokerage, and I always say that their biggest skill set is asking clients ‘Red or white?’ and ‘Still or sparkling?,’ because that’s basically all you need to do.” Nevertheless, it was clear that there were other qualifications under consideration. Down said, “I didn’t get a single technical question at my interview—it was all questions about university, and literally talking about people that we both knew.”