‘Industry’ HBO actors break down Rob and Yas Season 3 twist

Warning: the following contains major spoilers from the Season 3 finale of “Industry.”

After an interminable game of “Will They/Won’t They?,” “Industry” fans finally got an answer about Yasmin and Robert’s fate on Sunday night.

Bench sex be damned, these two will decidedly not be ending up together.

Yasmin stomped all over Rob’s poor little heart during Sunday’s Season 3 finale, revealing in brutal fashion that mere hours after being intimate with him for the first time, she’d gotten engaged to another man. Perhaps Rob (Harry Lawtey) never really stood a chance against the wealthy Henry (Kit Harington), especially now that Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is broke. Still, after she uttered “I love you” to Rob — the only time in her life she’d ever said the three words — we thought there was a sliver of hope for the HBO series’ resident sweethearts.

Alas, this is “Industry.” Expecting anyone to live according to a moral compass is foolhardy.

But let’s hear Abela and Lawtey break it all down themselves. Over a video chat from their native United Kingdom last week, the actors weighed in on their characters’ romance, Rob’s sexuality and how the hell this show will work next season if all of the Pierpoint vets are in different cities. (The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

First of all: Marisa, how could Yasmin do this to Robert?!

Abela: I kind of saw it coming, to be honest. I think that it’s the only decision she could have made in that moment. One choice she’s making is a choice that has a future attached to it — a future that she can understand that has security. And the other is to go back to London with Rob with no job, no finances, no protection against this onslaught of media attention that she’s been having to deal with. I think it’s quite a clear choice, actually, for someone like Yasmin.

Also, if you watch Episode 7, I don’t think they make that much sense together. They’re arguing 90% of the time. I think Yasmin feels like she’s disappointing Robert a lot. She’s not kind enough, gentle enough, patient enough. And I think Robert feels like he’s not impressive enough in what he’s offering her. They’re letting each other down, and that’s not a fun way to feel. Whereas Henry, although he doesn’t necessarily see her how she wants to be seen or cradle her emotionally, he doesn’t expect anything more from her than what she can give him. It’s a sort of business decision at the end of the day. I think that if she’d just come off two days in Wales with Robert that were blissful and beautiful and perfect, she’d have made that decision, but it wasn’t really clicking.

It was clicking sexually!

Abela: Yes, exactly. They had this great sex. They told each other they loved each other, which I think they do in that moment, at least. But I think for Yasmin it’s just not enough. She has a lot on her plate back in London. She doesn’t have a home, a family. It would be a lot of pressure on Robert to put up with that. Imagine the opposite. They drive away from this big house together, and they go back to Finsbury Park and we watch them, like, make dinner that night or order a delivery that night. What does Yasmin do next? Other than feel like she’s with someone that she loves. I think we’re forgetting that we’re talking about Yasmin here. She’s brutal. Feeling the warm and cozy thing is not at the top of her list.

The sex that Robert and Yasmin have is kind of the most beautiful thing about their relationship. It’s simple and it’s tender and it’s intimate, you know, compared to pissing on someone in the shower.

Both of your characters are sexually open. Harry, do you think there is a world where Rob is bisexual?

Lawtey: Fundamentally, yes. That’s always been part of the conversation that me and the boys have had since the first season. And there are scenes that never made it to the edit that explored that slightly more.

The show is a coming-of-age story. They’re in these evolving years in their lives and they’re being put into these awkward, intense, claustrophobic situations as part of this big ecosystem, which they’re kind of designed to serve. And yet, at the same time, they’re trying to carve out personality within that. And of course, their sexual lives and identities certainly intersect with all of that. The show has always treated that as character work and development. They all kind of surprise one another, and they’re all open because they live such a radical lifestyle.

Abela: They’re dealing with large sums of money every day, long hours, huge stakes. These things kind of lend themselves to wanting to throw themselves into things with more abandon than a normal person. They’re all becoming more and more desensitized, so they’re more desperate to try something that’s going to stimulate them sexually or emotionally in their relationships. In Season 1, Yasmin was shocking herself with the things that she was asking people to do for her. And now it’s more sort of like, “Am I willing to go there with him? Yeah, maybe. Why not? Let’s see how it goes.”

I think fans shipped Yas and Rob because they always seemed like the two characters who had the softest centers in this harsh environment. But in the finale, Yasmin shows a brutality I didn’t know she had in her.

Abela: In terms of an audience wanting Yasmin to sit Robert down and tell him that she got engaged? I think she’s scared to do that. I don’t think it comes out of malice. Like, she’s not trying to humiliate him at the table. I think it would be a terrifying conversation for her to have with him, and I don’t think she’s capable of having it.

I definitely think that she’s gotten harder throughout the seasons. I agree that one of the things that brought her and Rob together in the past was that, compared to Harper [played by Myha’la], she had a sort of gooey center. She wasn’t as blindly driven by success. But Yasmin and Harper have become more and more similar as the seasons have gone on because Yasmin’s situation in life has become more desperate. Survival is No. 1 on her list now.

Abela, seen here with Kit Harington, says she doesn’t think Yasmin was “capable” of having the “terrifying conversation” where she admitted to Rob she was engaged.

(Simon Ridgway / HBO)

Lawtey: This is also a testament to how little we actually know [about the plot], because there was a certain point in Season 3 where we were taking bets on what we thought might happen for [Robert and Yasmin] at the end of the season. Naturally, I was slightly more hopeful, of course.

Where we find them in Season 3, there’s enough texture and integrity that they do love each other and see one another authentically for who they are — almost the way they wish to be seen, if they weren’t up against all these different challenges in their little universe. But ultimately, do they pound for pound make one another happy each day? Is that kind of connection sustainable? Maybe not.

Yasmin is in this bind where she’s forced into making a very practical choice that serves her. You can’t judge that, necessarily. And I think it’s fundamentally because Robert knows her, he gets it and accepts it pretty quickly in relation to how devastated he is. The speed with which he gathers himself is unlike Rob, but it’s because he knows that there’s a sliver of a world where this is wonderful and brilliant — but it’s a long shot. If anything, the ending of this season is a springboard for Robert to go and rediscover himself and try to recapture a part of him that has gone missing.

He does already kind of seem over it by the time he says goodbye to her in the driveway.

Lawtey: He knows her and he knows the system now. This season is a final look behind the curtain for Robert, socially and politically and professionally. He is coming to grips, finally, with the structure of how things operate and his place within that structure. Without being too cruel to himself, he’s accepted that ultimately, he’s not made for this world. And Yasmin is. And that’s where they have to part. It was a pipe dream, I think, their relationship. One that he believed in fervently for a minute. That scene that they have together by the lake, that’s kind of like a little window into that. But it’s a bit of a dream. I don’t think it would be like that.

Everyone in the show at Pierpoint has to ask themselves, “Why do I come to work? Why do I show up here? What do I get from this?” And I think almost all of those questions have been answered for Rob, apart from Yasmin. This is the final untethering for him. And so it’s very freeing. “Oh, I can just go and build my own life now, and I can try to be happy again.” He’s spent far too long for the last couple of years being sad.

“This is the final untethering for him,” Lawtey says of his character. “He’s spent far too long for the last couple of years being sad.”

(Nick Strasburg / HBO)

And Yasmin is left behind at this mansion. Is she really cut out to be a housewife in the English countryside?

Abela: I don’t think she’s cut out to sit idly by and be someone’s wife. But I don’t think that Henry’s gonna ask that of her, either. I don’t think that it’s gonna be a conventional marriage [Laughs]. I just get the feeling that neither of them really need that from the other one. I’m sure she’ll be up and down from London.

But I don’t think Yasmin should have ever been an investment banker. This season, so many traumatic events happen to her and I still think that Yasmin looks the most lost when she’s on the desk. I think that she looks far more comfortable on a boat, even after her father has just jumped overboard. She’s really a talented manipulator, and she’ll find a way of using that to her advantage.

I’m so glad that the show got renewed, especially because the showrunners really wrapped so many storylines up with a bow that I feared Season 3 would be the end of “Industry.” Did you ever worry about that?

Lawtey: With Mickey [Down] and Konrad [Kay, the showrunners], they always have this really exciting notion of just burning their best ideas and challenging themselves to come up with something interesting and dynamic and brave. They’ll always run it and see if they can write themselves out of that corner. So I never really second guess the direction they’re going in, because they always have something up their sleeves. They don’t save anything for final episodes or whatever. As we’ve seen from a few points of the season, no one’s ever really dead, either. They make the most of every inch of the characters in this show.

Abela: It does feel like an end of a chapter for all of them. But, you know, I kind of felt the same at the end of Season 2 with Harper leaving the bank. Season 1 was all about Harper’s relationship to Pierpoint. If they were going to keep going with “Industry,” it didn’t feel that tethered to Pierpoint anymore. These characters were sort of bursting out of that establishment.

Can you imagine an “Industry” where Yas is in England, Rob is in San Francisco, Harper is in New York, etc.?

Abela: I guess they’re probably not all in the same workplace. I don’t know where they’ll be.

Lawtey: Their lives are rapidly becoming broader, as is the general scope and scale of the show. I think it’s fair to say that in this season, the boys started taking much bigger swings in the tone and style and the landscape of the show, and I think that really suits the characters and their development. Those channels to one another are still going to be there, but they’re being stretched and pushed into different shapes. Which is exciting for us, to keep on having to rethink and recontextualize the way in which these people relate to one another.

The cast went to watch Ken Leung film the final scene of Episode 3 where he took a baseball bat to the Pierpoint offices.

(Simon Ridgway / HBO)

Was there any sadness in saying goodbye to the Pierpoint set?

Abela: You do get a little bit sentimental about this fake building that you sort of grew up. If we were sad about saying goodbye to it, it was more about saying goodbye to the season and what the end of a Season 3 meant. The show means a lot to us, and we as people, I think, mean a lot to each other. And so we all went down and watched the final scene with Ken [Leung, who plays Eric] swinging that bat around. It just kind of felt like a moment. We all kind of grew up in that mini trailer park.

Lawtey: It was like a really special thing to go and see Ken and send off that space for us. It does feel like a home, in a way, creatively. In the picture of our careers as actors, that represents HQ. The building where the trading floor was, they never took it down even in the long gaps between seasons. So, yeah, it was a strange thing to walk away from. When I think of that room, I think of the ensemble of the show. It’s been a collective and a community of people that has kind of revolved, but there’s been a nucleus that has stayed the same. And the home for those people is that space. We just had a lot of laughs there and some brilliant times. I was chatting to Ken the other day, and he said this season signifies the closing of a circle. And now you’ve just got to open a new circle, I think.