‘Industry’ Star Harry Lawtey Jokes His “Pathetic” Playpen Brawl With Kit Harington Was “Not ‘Game of Thrones’ Standard”

Not even twenty minutes into Industry Season 3 Episode 2 “Smoke and Mirrors” and a physical fight breaks out between Lumi CEO Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and Pierpoint’s Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey). The fight begins, earnestly enough, as a tense conversation wherein Robert realizes that Henry has indeed been disingenuous about Lumi’s financials. Soon, the argument boils over into a showdown between the working class-raised Robert and “posh c*nt” Henry. And then…well, the two grown men begin awkwardly pummeling each other in the Lumi office’s play room. Ball pits, a stuffed sunflower, and even a small child partake in the action.

It’s an utterly hilarious display of misplaced machismo and a far cry from the intense battle sequences HBO fans have come to expect from Kit Harington. Which is something that made Industry star Harry Lawtey chuckle when Decider spoke to him last week.

“I mean it’s certainly a less impressive fight than Kit Harington is used to in his television career,” Lawtey said, laughing softly. “Yeah, it’s certainly not Game of Thrones standard. It wasn’t planned as thoroughly as one of those would be, as well, I imagine.”

“I think that was part of charm, that it was supposed to be awkward and pathetic, really. We really threw ourselves into it and hopefully, it provides, I guess, a bit of levity or something a bit weird.”

Lawtey also revealed to Decider that both the playpen fight and the tense scene that precedes it were shot on the second day of production. That meant that Harington and Lawtey had “only known each other for about 24 hours.” Already, though, the two actors were aligned as scene partners. Lawtey explained that both he and Harington “really cared” about the scene where Robert confronts Henry about Lumi’s financials. “Like, it speaks in a big way 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 and so on,” Lawtey said. “That was when [Robert’s] image of Henry starts to kind of fall apart.”

Now, instead of seeing Henry as an evangelist of green energy, Robert can only see the aristocratic tech billionaire as just another posh charlatan.

“There’s a huge, glaring divide in terms of their class, and they come from the opposite ends of the spectrum socioeconomically. That is something that they both find hard to ignore, difficult to overcome,” Lawtey said.

“I think Henry represents something very aspirational for Robert, which is a kind of a part of his psyche that he needs to shake off — but he just can’t. Getting close to someone of that ilk and seeing the kind of inner workings of that sphere of society is both exhilarating and also completely repugnant to Robert, because the kind of the fiber that it’s built on, it is kind of ugly, you know?”

Lawtey told Decider that he and Harington gave the scene all they had. “We were a little bit emotionally exhausted from it. Then we had to sort of like do this ridiculous fight in this play pen,” Lawtey said with a laugh.

The fight between the two men crescendoes with Robert getting a bit of the upper hand. He pins Henry in the playpen’s ball pit and begins to not only whack, but also suffocate the wealthier man with a stuffed flower. The ridiculous rampage only pauses when a little girl rushes into play.

“We hope had a slightly unusual undertone to it,” Lawtey said. “It was sort of the stuffed toy moment at the end where you see the kind of high stress environment that these characters are put in and the bizarre actions that it provokes in them.” 

Lawtey was quick to point out that despite the fight in Industry Season 3 Episode 2, he felt that “to some degree,” there is a “bromance” that is blossoming between the two characters. One that mirrors the one that he and Kit Harington forged on set.

“We became mates very quickly,” Lawtey said. “Yeah, when I think back to Season 3, I often remember just having a really good laugh with him.”