Not even twenty minutes later Industry Season 3 Episode 2 “Smoke and Mirrors” and a physical fight breaks out between Lumi’s CEO Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and Pierpoint’s Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey). The fight starts off, seriously enough, as a tense conversation in which Robert realizes that Henry has been dishonest about Lumi’s finances. Soon, the argument escalates into a showdown between the working-class-bred Robert and “posh prick” Henry. And then… well, the two grown men start clumsily beating each other up in the Lumi office playroom. Ball pits, a stuffed sunflower, and even a toddler get in on the action.
It’s an absolutely hilarious display of misplaced machismo and is a far cry from the intense battle sequences HBO fans have come to expect from Kit Harington. Something that made Industry Star Harry Lawtey laughed when Jugo Mobile spoke to him last week.
“I mean it’s certainly a less impressive fight than Kit Harington is used to seeing in his television career,” Lawtey said, laughing softly. “Yeah, it certainly isn’t.” game of Thrones standard. It wasn’t planned as thoroughly as one of those would be, I guess.”
“I think that was part of the charm, that it was supposed to be strange and pathetic, really. We really got into it and hoped that it would provide, I guess, a bit of levity or something a bit strange.”
Lawtey also revealed to Jugo Mobile that both the playpen fight and the tense scene leading up to it were filmed on the second day of production. That means Harington and Lawtey had “only known each other for about 24 hours.” However, the two actors were already lined up as scene partners. Lawtey explained that both he and Harington “cared a lot” about the scene where Robert confronts Henry about Lumi’s finances. “It kind of speaks a lot to the themes of this season,” Lawtey said.
“They have this very important confrontation about the structure of the company, the repercussions of it going wrong and what that means for a lot of people in the public, etc.,” Lawtey said. “That’s when [Robert’s] “Henry’s image begins to crumble.”
Now, instead of seeing Henry as a green energy evangelist, Robert can only see the aristocratic tech billionaire as another posh charlatan.
“There is a huge and glaring gap in terms of class, and they come from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. That is something that both find difficult to ignore, difficult to overcome,” Lawtey said.
“I think Henry represents something very aspirational for Robert, which is kind of a part of his psyche that he needs to get rid of, but can’t. Getting close to someone of that type and seeing the inner workings of that sphere of society is both exhilarating and completely disgusting for Robert, because the kind of fiber that it’s built on is kind of ugly, you know?”
Lawtey told Jugo Mobile that he and Harington gave everything they had in the scene. “We were kind of emotionally drained by it. So we had to do some sort of ridiculous fight in this playpen,” Lawtey said with a laugh.
The fight between the two men reaches its climax and Robert gains a slight advantage. He pins Henry down in the playground’s ball pit and begins not only beating, but also choking the richer man with a stuffed flower. The ridiculous ruckus only stops when a little girl runs in to play.
“We hoped it had a slightly unusual tone,” Lawtey said. “It was like the teddy bear moment at the end, where you see the kind of high-stress environment these characters are put in and the strange actions that it causes in them.”
Lawtey was quick to point out that despite the struggle in Industry In Season 3, Episode 2, he felt that “to some extent” there is a “bromance” that is blossoming between the two characters, one that mirrors the one he and Kit Harington forged on set.
“We became friends very quickly,” Lawtey said. “Yeah, when I think back to Season 3, I often remember having a good laugh with him.”
