‘Industry’ Charlie Heaton on Ending ‘Stranger Things’ and Jim’s Death

[This story contains major spoilers from Industry season four and mild spoilers from the series finale of Stranger Things.]

Many stories begin at the end. Charlie Heaton’s Industry story is one such tale, albeit with a twist: it starts with two endings.

The actor was closing up his home in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spent the better part of a decade shooting Stranger Things, the Netflix sensation now gone the way of the Upside Down. As he wrapped up one major chapter of his life, Heaton got the call that he booked his next chapter: a role on HBO’s Industry, the critically adored finance drama. Where the heroes of Hawkins battled Demogorgons and Mind Flayers, the antiheroes of Industry wage a different war altogether: workplace power dynamics, sexual dominance, prolific drug use and earning the almighty dollar at any literal and more cost.

Heaton would be joining the cast for season four as a brand new character. He was the very first character seen in the premiere: Jim Dycker, a finance journalist investigating high level fraud — a crusade he waged at, once again, just about any literal and moral cost. In the end, he paid the highest cost of all however, when he lost his life on the other side of a major drug bender with the show’s most Uncut Gems coded character, Rishi, played with chaotic perfection by Sagar Radia.

Discovering Jim dead on his couch, and hearing cops right outside the door, Rishi — whose life is already in the bin, thanks to a gambling addiction that directly led to his wife’s murder in the previous season’s finale — decides enough is enough. He leaps off the flat’s balcony, intending to join Jim in the great beyond. Instead, he pays the moral cost, not the literal one, as he survives the fall and is taken away by police. And that’s a wrap on Rishi as we know him.

Signing up for the series for only four episodes, Heaton knew he was joining a well-loved show for a very specific purpose. And he knew it intimately, long before shooting the scene. In order to secure the part on Industry, Heaton taped an audition reading not just any scene as Jim, but reading the final scene as Jim, which contains a nearly nonstop drug-addled back-and-forth with Rishi. Taping the scene, capturing the final moments of a man’s life, ended up being a harrowing experience, understandably, not just because of the text, but because of the text — as in, an unbelievable amount of jargon-infused dialogue. For Heaton, the result was an equally frustrated performance that mimicked Jim in his last couple of minutes on Earth — exactly what Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were seeking.

It was Friday when Heaton was in Atlanta, knee-deep in packing, when he got the call that he won the part. Shooting would begin in the United Kingdom on Monday. Two endings, leading to a new beginning. Below, Heaton spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about that frenetic journey, returning from the middle America of Stranger Things to his home country on Industry, and why he can’t believe there are still folks who don’t believe Stranger Things has truly ended — and perhaps with good reason, given Heaton’s thoughts on an eventual revival.

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What was your familiarity with Industry before signing on? Were you a fan?

No, I’d heard of the show, but I’d never seen it. I heard of it as promotion for season three came around a bit heavier, and I had a few friends who were watching it. When this came around, it was really last minute for an audition. It was a dense, dense amount of dialogue in the sides. I put myself down on tape. I had an idea of roughly what I wanted to do. And then I had a chat with Konrad and Mickey, and I think I auditioned on Wednesday, had a call with them on Friday, flew from Atlanta where I was at the time, over to Cardiff to film on a Monday. The whole thing was so fast and so intimidating. I had to digest the show so fast. When you’re coming onto another show, it’s the first thing you have to do: understand the tone. Industry is so much about the tone.

Absolutely; you don’t need to know the trading jargon to understand Jimmy and Rishi are in a bad way, and that’s what matters most. But you need to get a handle on the jargon, right? You need to make it sound believable, and you needed to learn that really quickly.

Definitely. In the beginning, because it was coming around so fast, I was reading and reading and reading and going over all my lines almost mechanically. I knew I had to know that dialogue inside and out. Even if I didn’t fully understand the whole time what I was saying [I just needed to get it down]. And the anxiety … I had just finished Stranger Things. I’ve been on that show since the very beginning, and I’ve experienced people coming into the show and what that feels like. But I’ve never done that myself, where you’re joining in an established cast. So it was a new experience.

Any hazing rituals?

No…

No one pressured you to spill the Stranger Things ending?

No, they were great. (Laughs.) 

You’re the very first character we follow in season four. It sets you up as a major player. And now here we are past the midpoint, and you’re already gone. Was it a surprise to you, or was that part of the deal when you signed on?

No, not a surprise. That was my audition scene. 

Wow, they threw you in the deep end.

I remember being mad about it! Because by now, you’ve seen how much dialogue that is. I was like, “They want me to learn all this dialogue in two days?” I remember being angry. Part of that rage of like: This is so unfair. They want me to learn this whole thing. I half learned it. I was reading off the paper. I was pretty frantic. I also know that because Industry is set in London and everyone on it at that point had been quite posh and Southern, I was trying to do a bit of that accent as well. And then on that scene, my Northern accent just broke through. It was my natural self. When I spoke with them, they asked, “Can you do that? What you did in the second take?” So that rage really helped out.

So your journey with this character really does begin at the end. Was it helpful to have his death as a North star, especially having already performed it?

Yes. It’s like unveiling the onion. It’s so telling as to where this person is going to go when things go wrong. In life when things go wrong, that’s when you really find out people’s character. And it is tragic. It’s sad. They’re so good at pushing these characters to the wire. There’s even that surprise with Jim. There’s a line in it about him, the fact that he was at a gay bar. And I don’t know, there was just so many little reveals of what his subconscious is saying in that scene and his belief. So you really get to know who he is and then working backwards from that, it’s like, Okay, we’re putting a mask on. What’s he like at work? How does he present himself?

At what point in the process did you shoot the death scene?

The very end.

You ended with the end! 

Totally, man. And it was such a crazy scene to shoot.

Absolutely. It’s your very final scene as Jim, obviously, but it’s also so central to Rishi, who is such a dangerous figure on the show.

Yeah, it was Sagar’s finale as well. You asked earlier if I was a fan, and when I started watching the show, that first season, Rishi really stands out. He says such wild things. He really goes there. His character sets the tone a lot for the specific tone in Industry. So I was really excited I got to get that scene with him. He’s such a wonderful actor and we both knew the stakes.

We both got to rehearse it with director Michelle Savill beforehand. We hadn’t gotten the dialogue fully down, so we were both a bit nervous about rehearsing. In the script, it’s a dialogue-based scene, but she let us play around and find props. The amount of freedom from Konrad and Mickey and Michelle was a really cool thing about Industry that I liked. They shoot it very non-traditionally. They use long lenses, so the way they cover a scene allows you to be able to explore the space you’re in. You’re not stuck to anything.

We’d be encouraged to get up and try something else. It was very freeing. They didn’t worry too much about continuity. I think for them, what is important is energy and pace. Like you say, you don’t need to understand the dialogue all the time to understand the show, as long as you get the state.

You started Industry on the nearly immediate other side of finishing Stranger Things. You’re not the first major franchise player to join this cast. Did you ever got a chance to speak with Kiernan Shipka and Kit Harington about their experiences navigating their careers after Mad Men and Game of Thrones?

I spent a lot of time with Kiernan. We talked about Mad Men and of course Sabrina. She’s been at this for such a long time. And Kit, we only had one conversation, because we had just that one scene where I confront him at the press conference. We got to hang out all day on set. I had just wrapped Stranger Things, and I think it was very apparent I had just gone through that experience. There’s a bit of kinship there, understanding what things are like when such a big part of your life ends.

He didn’t warn you there would be fans out there insisting there’s a secret bonus final episode to the show? “People were so sure about this Game of Thrones extra episode, ‘Westeros Gate’…”

Gosh, it’s mind-blowing. (Laughs.) It’s very funny, and very interesting how people process things coming to an end, and not wanting it to be over. It’s mad that there’s such a big reaction in that way. I find it really, really interesting, to be honest.

What’s life like for you right now, just a bit more than a month past the finale? 

It’s still very out there at the moment. Every time the show would come out — and you’re in the zeitgeist, in everybody’s homes — when they see you on the street, they love to scream their opinions. 

Do they want to know what Jonathan’s cannibal movie is about?

No one’s asked that yet.

The Duffers said the finale contained clues for the spinoff. Folks are locked in on this weird magic rock. What if it’s just a series of low-budget indies directed by Jonathan?

I would love that. How cool. (Laughs.) Just a bunch of really bad features!

Are you fully finished, in your mind? Say 20 years pass and the Duffers want to get the gang back together. Are you in or out?

I mean, how can you say? Twenty years from now is such a long time. You still need time to process this right now. It only just ended. But I’m so excited to see what they do next, even outside of the franchise. I think for them to reach the end here and get to ask that question: “What do we do now?” I think that’s great. But we are a family. And I do think it’s finally hitting us all that it’s over. We have a group chat, and it’s clear that it’s hit us at different points. It’s still not fully realized that we’ve said goodbye to it. Usually we go back to film around midway through the year. So I think there will be all these little moments where we realize it’s over. But you know, their original idea was to do season one, and then have season two set 15 years later. So you never know…

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Industry releases new episodes Sundays on HBO and streams on HBO Max at 9 p.m.; Stranger Things is streaming on Netflix.