Meet Indy Lewis: the new girl on BBC's banking drama 'Industry'
Warning: this interview contains spoilers for Industry Season 2.
For your first ever acting job, HBO's intense, drug- and sex-loaded banking drama, Industry, is a bit of a trial by fire. "I was only 18 and had just left college when I first auditioned, and I actually was up for a totally different part," says the now 21-year-old Indy Lewis, the latest 'grad' at the now infamous Pierpoint & Co. "The producers said, listen, we really, really like you, but I think it'd be a bit bold of us for your first job to throw you in right in the deep end like this..."
Lewis was instead cast in the smaller role of Venetia – a blink and you'll miss her addition to season one – but a main character in the show's just released second season. To clarify, the 'deep end' she would have encountered in season one, includes much drug-taking, nudity and sex; what Lewis euphemistically refers to as "an HBO kind of show". Think all the ruthless scheming and graphic content of Game of Thrones, but minus the violence and dragons.
Instead, the battles in Industry all take place on the trading floor: barbs, aggression, cut-throat deals and backstabbing. The stage is a moral quagmire, leaving its viewers wondering if we are watching a zoo filled with terrible creatures. But do we hate the competitive, seemingly unethical monsters at Pierpoint? Or are we actually rooting for them?
"I think that is what makes this show so compelling, and it makes it so exciting to play as an actor," Lewis says. "So much of what you see is morally dubious, but the script also gives you many things to take into account with each character. As the series goes on, with a lot of the characters – and definitely with Venetia – that conflict between so-called right and wrong becomes more and more overwhelming; the murkiness and the ambiguity are so hard to track. Every character's moral compass is tested."
The show has become a juggernaut since its 2020 release (you can now buy Pierpoint & Co hoodies) but when it was first released, despite the newsy hook of a pilot directed by Lena Dunham, it was a script written by two ex-bankers with a cast of relative unknowns.
"I think that is why the cast are so close," says Lewis, explaining that season one was an intense bonding experience for most of the original lead actors. "That was daunting [for me] to come into, because everyone had bonded so much in the first series, but everyone's so lovely and welcoming."
"The feeling of impostor syndrome was actually useful for the character though," she continues. " I was hoping that I would be able to prove myself in a very similar way to all the grads at Pierpoint."
Lewis's new grad Venetia bursts into season two as, in her words, the "woke" younger generation recruit. She battles superiors on outdated and misogynistic 'new girl' initiations and challenges demeaning status quo decisions. Yet, just as we have seen happen with every character in Industry, Venetia is slowly broken by the demands of Pierpoint.
"It's very interesting to see her voice and moral compass waver as the series goes on and play the internal processes behind that," she says. "I think she is quite naive in the way that she expects things to go. But in some ways that's helpful to her – that very simplistic, 'this is right, this is wrong, this is what I should be doing' way of thinking. It is very refreshing."
Venetia's character development sees her eventually involved in a sexual harassment storyline – one that is entirely female-focused, from the aggressor to the women in the office who downplay her accusation.
"I think it would probably have been much easier to do a more traditional 'bad guy gets his comeuppance' storyline, but to explore those themes through a more complex scenario where you've got a woman being the aggressor, and you've got a lack of community and sisterhood as a response, that was so interesting," Lewis recalls. "As an actress you don't expect those sort of scenes where the dynamics are all female. It's very interesting to see women in these positions of power and to look at that through the lens of the universal way that power might compromise your moral standpoint."
Aside from Industry, Lewis has stared alongside Stanley Tucci ("Oh my god, the dream," she laughs) in the Spain-set 2021 adventure drama series La Fortuna. Despite filming during a pandemic, and the inevitably less glamorous reality of daily tests and quarantine hotels, Lewis describes the experience as enormous fun – even if her character still had her darker moments. That, and the complexity of projects like Industry, are clearly what this fresh new actress is on the hunt for.
"That's what I look for in a job," she says. "Scripts that have these amazing characters that are nuanced and intriguing. Those are the roles that are so tempting. I want more of them."
Something tells me more of those roles are coming for Indy Lewis.
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