Sixty-two minutes passed The finale of the third season of industryYou may have mistakenly thought that exhaling was safe. HBO's tense financial drama, which revolves around the exploits of employees at the fictional investment bank Pierpoint & Co., has been giving us a rare moment of resolution for its main players: Crisis-ridden Yasmine Cara Hanani (Marisa Abella) has gotten engaged to aristocrat Henry Mock (Kit Harington ). College dropout Harper Stern (Myha'la) was having a #GirlBoss moment Forbes magazine. Even sad boy Rob Spearing (Harry Lawty) was getting a fresh start in Silicon Valley. but, industry being industryHowever, the show had other ideas.
The brief glimmer of harmony is eventually shattered when Rishi Ramazani (Sagar Razia) finally gets his comeuppance. Earlier in the episode, the misogynist was insulted by Harper, who told him that “a machine can do your job” before kicking him out of her office. Then, in that 62-minute hour, things get much worse: Vinay (Aseem Chaudhary) – a terrifying debt collector who owes Rishi £500,000, which he borrowed to fund his gambling addiction – shows up at his house. Their argument escalates and Vinay shoots Rishi's wife Diana (Emily Barber) in the head. Her blood splatters all over him.
The shocking moment came when co-creators Conrad Kaye and Mikey Down were pondering the idea of a fallout. “We thought: What if we actually started showing the consequences of someone's actions in this world?” Dawn explains. “Because Rishi, like a lot of the characters, has never had to face anyone.”
Richie's turbulent narrative arc began in the season's fourth episode, “White Mischief.” The first episode was an interesting one, one that often felt like I was living in some sort of nightmare simulation industry To focus on one character, he moves Rishi and his inner demons from the periphery to the center. When Season 3 was greenlit, “The Rishi Episode” was one of the first things Kai and Dawn wrote on the board in the writers room. “It was the twentieth episode of industry“So we wanted it to be high-octane and fast-paced,” says Down. “It's a bit like a palate cleanser, but it's also not that, because it's an irritant.”
Mission accomplished. In White Mischief, Rishi goes from one disaster to another as his gambling addiction spirals out of control. After driving himself to the brink of financial ruin, he defrauded his colleagues in a variety of phony betting schemes. Debt collector Vinay keeps showing up at random intervals, adding to the tension. Sagar Radhi, who plays Rishi, still remembers reading the script for the episode: “As an actor, you go, ‘Oh, man, how am I going to pull this off?’ “You have a moment of terror, and then you get to work.”
Before this point, the public did not know much about Rishi. In the first two seasons, he didn't feel like an essential character, but “White Mischief” — which Razia calls “almost like a movie” — showed us that he actually exists at some intersection industry It is everything. Ostensibly, the series is about the pursuit of money. But in reality, it's about the elitist class system in the UK, which you can't always buy your way into. And for a character like Rishi, it's also about what it means to be a man.
We soon learn that Rishi has two distinct personalities. At work, he is reckless and reckless. (One even created an anonymous social media account, “Overheard at Pierpoint,” dedicated to exposing his chauvinistic workplace behavior.) But at home, we find it much less safe. He moved his wife – a self-described “rose of the English countryside” – to the leafy countryside. Richie lives near where she grew up, and uses Diana (Brittany Ashworth) to fulfill a kind of fantasy of upward class mobility. He became interested in renovating the cricket pavilion on his home grounds, which is on his own land but technically belongs to the village. (Cricket is very popular in former British colonies, including Pakistan and India.) Resistance to renewal — from Rishi's posh white neighbors, whom he desperately wants to accept — is beginning to feel more weighty.
In these surroundings, Rishi is subjected to a slow feed of microaggressions, delivered in a subtle English manner that is never blatant enough to warrant. Even attempts to make him feel like he belongs — as when his mother-in-law tells him she's cooking “accessible red cabbage biryani” for Christmas — confirm that he doesn't quite fit in. It's something Razia can relate to. “Being British South Asian, I know that feeling of otherness,” he says. “As someone born and raised in London, in a bastion of multiculturalism, I can really feel my structure whenever I leave.”
In the end, Rishi takes a bat to the cricket pavilion, smashing framed pictures of the village's lineage of wealthy white men into smithereens. It's a moment that feels surprisingly anti-colonial and anti-elite for a man who, just a few scenes earlier, was jumping for joy at the announcement of tax cuts for the rich.
Whether it's his dirty jokes or his flashy sports car, Rishi's bravery is a protection tactic. Perhaps the British nuances in how he is portrayed as an underdog are why viewers in the UK are particularly sympathetic to him. Razia was surprised when Rishi became somewhat of a “fan favorite” among the Brits in Season 2, but comparatively, American audiences were more keen to watch his downfall. “Rishi is clearly behaving horribly,” Dawn says. “But he's the underdog in the world he's created for himself, and even though he's brought a lot of it on himself, he still pushes against the things he seems like he should be pushing against.”
At the end of “White Mischief,” we see Rishi's softer side as he bends over his son — the child he was holding at the beginning of the episode while watching porn on his phone, with his nose dripping with blood after doing so. Lots of cocaine at a family barbecue. “It's much easier to raise strong boys than to fix broken men,” his wife whispers in the episode's penultimate scene. Finally, he seems ashamed of his behavior.
Brittany Ashworth as Rishi's wife, Diana, in the third season episode “White Mischief.”
In many ways, Rishi is a character who does not fit existing stereotypes. For example, the standard portrayal used by the British media of a gambling addict is a working-class white man from a country town, not a city banker with the last name Ramadani. Even Rishi's boss Eric (Ken Leung) seems surprised by his ultra-conservative politics, describing him as “the ghost of Margaret Thatcher in a handsome Asian kid.”
People might be surprised to learn that the character is based very closely on real people that Kai and Dawn met while working on the trading floor in their 20s, from his right-wing views and vulgar language to his addiction to risk. “Betting on everything from horse racing to when people took their lunch break was an integral part of the culture,” Kay recalls. “The idea of loss and reward, which is obviously so central to the show, bleeds from the trading floor into all areas of Rishi’s life.” There were practical benefits to the gambling story too: “We knew he would lose money on the trading floor, so we thought: ‘How do we not lose that power in his home life?’” “I made sure the story never lost any energy.
Ultimately, aside from being slightly bruised and battered from a brawl at the casino, Rishi faces no real consequences in White Mischief. At the end of the episode, after a heated argument, his luxurious wife, the program presenter, agreed to pay off his debts. And when it looks like he might start to sort himself out, he immediately starts betting again. It's crazy to watch, but it's not far from what Razia discovered while researching the role. “What I've learned is that addicts, in a way, sometimes like to lose as much as they like to win,” he says. “It's as if the lower the bottom, the higher the high. It's about the process.”
When HBO encouraged Kay and Dawn to continue Rishi's dark story after episode four, they toyed with the idea of Rishi being killed off, but it felt like they were “letting it go too easily.” In the end, they settled on his wife becoming a sacrifice for his sins. However, the plan to shoot Diana in the head originally received some pushback.
“We wrote it in the script, and HBO said, ‘What the hell?!’ And they said very I rarely say that. “They usually want us to push it further, be darker, more provocative,” says Down. Even after filming wrapped, HBO still had reservations that the scene didn't look like the show. Only when they saw it in the context of the episode did they agree that it worked. “They thought it really hit home [point] “We were trying to make it that there are consequences in this world,” Down says some the people.”
This act seems like retaliation for Rishi's treatment of women as well. Throughout Season 3, he constantly exposes Sweetpea, a young classmate he is sleeping with. At the same time he forces his wife, the only person he truly loves, into the role of sexless matriarch. (Or as she says: “A boring breeding machine.”) Like many men industryRishi seems to view women primarily as a means of sexual gratification or to allay his fears about masculinity and class. This eventually comes back to bite him: In Harper's office, when she taunts him and calls him a “dinosaur,” Richie finally discovers what it's like to feel rid of him. Here, it is no coincidence that it is Sweetpea who shows him to the door, or that his final punishment is that his wife—his prized possession and the last remaining layer of his armor—is taken from him.
Looking forward to season 4, which has already been confirmed by HBO, what's next for Richie? “I think his story is not over yet,” says Razia. “I think there's still something there, and I've been thinking a lot about what that looks like.” Whether we see Rishi again or not, his story has opened the door for more standalone episodes featuring different characters. Most importantly, the photography landscape has changed radically industryBecause the stakes are now much higher – literally life and death. “It indicates that the show will be very different now,” Kay said. “We will see a part of London and the financial world that is more complex and corrupt.”
