Harry Lawtey Lives for the Pressure

Photo: Jamie Salmons

We initially published this story on September 12, 2024. We are updating it on the occasion of Industry airing its season three finale this week, and Joker: Folie à Deux’s wide release in theaters.

Harry Lawtey has always been a highflier. In fact, the 27-year-old Industry actor can, sort of, operate a helicopter. He wasn’t quite taking a chopper to school, but in the bright and early Mediterranean mornings before he went to class in Cyprus, his military aircraft-engineer father would bring him to the airfield to prepare rescue helicopters for the day, then take him to school around the corner. “I knew the whole routine of safety checks in the aircraft,” he recalls — all with his father’s supervision, of course. “My dad grew up in a very militaristic life, and I’m glad he’s only ever really taken all the benefits that it could give me, which is an identity and a community and a way of being.”

On a blazing-hot afternoon in Camden, Lawtey is getting reacquainted with his Cypriot upbringing. The two of us are sitting by the open screen doors of Daphne, a Greek restaurant around the corner from the Camden Town Tube station. This place is special to Lawtey: A few years ago, when he was a budding actor trying to make it in the city, he lived on this street with a friend from Cyprus. This area is populated with Greek eateries, and the pair decided to test each one, grading the restaurants in curated categories such as “service,” “food,” and “vibes.” “We decided this one was the best,” Lawtey concludes. Nevertheless, he gravitates toward the classics: pork souvlaki with calamari, grilled halloumi, and spanakopita.

Lawtey’s adopted Greek heritage is somewhat surprising given that for three seasons on HBO’s Industry, his performance — delivered an octave lower than his regular voice — is that of an all-English lad. As Robert Spearing, he plays the runt of Pierpoint & Co.’s litter, a working-class kid masquerading as someone in step with his wealthy, elite clientele. Out of his depth, Rob gets caught up in the strange, psychosexual politics of the bank’s toxic environment, seemingly deteriorating the more he grows accustomed to its ways.

Photo: Jamie Salmons

For all of Rob’s pitfalls, fans can at least sympathize with the fact that he is always deeply going through it. When Lawtey’s character isn’t simping for his nepo-baby co-worker Yasmin Kara-Hanani or recovering from the deaths of his parental figures (first his mother, then his Oxford-alum mentor), he is just trying to piss off as few people as possible on the cutthroat trading floor. In the third season’s premiere, Nicole, a predatory client of Rob’s who had groomed him into a situationship, dies beside him overnight. Four episodes later, he’s thrown under the bus by Pierpoint in a public inquiry into the bank’s handling of its risky new client, the energy company Lumi. When Rob complains about the mistreatment, he’s simply told by a Pierpoint suit that he’s “fuckable.”

When I open my phone to show Lawtey how the fans of Industry have pegged him as the show’s resident sad boy, he practically squirms in his seat. But the tweets are too good not to share: “every episode of Industry i’m like ‘rob is at his lowest’ but it just keeps getting worse for him idk how much lower he can get,” one reads. Another gets an amused chuckle from Lawtey: “Can the INDUSTRY gods give Rob a BREAK?” it says, paired with an edit of his character looking characteristically forlorn set to Mitski’s “I Bet on Losing Dogs.”

“I was kind of saying the same thing when we were making it,” Lawtey tells me. “It’s felt like one steady, unrelenting decline, for three seasons now, to this shell of a puppy-man. It’s funny that people have identified that. I used to joke that it feels like I was, on a daily basis, turning up to give a generalized, melancholy facial expression for six months straight. That was all I had to give.”

To say that Rob only operates in one mode, however, does a disservice to the emotional gymnastics Lawtey delivers in each episode. The actor conceals layers of anguish and heartbreak beneath his trademark “melancholy facial expression,” as if he’s tacking duct tape over cracked glass. Many of Lawtey’s scenes in season three required him to go toe to toe with Kit Harington (Rob has been assigned to wrangle Harington’s Sir Henry Muck, the failson CEO of Lumi), and he holds his own against one of the biggest new names added to Industry’s cast.

It hasn’t been a solitary effort: He learned a tremendous amount from co-star Ken Leung, whom Lawtey calls “a guru, a gentleman, and a genius.” Just as vital to his education on the Industry set are his “best friends,” Myha’la and Marisa Abela, who play co-leads Harper Stern and Yasmin. “I think they are generational talents,” Lawtey says. “And they’re both so calm. You can’t faze them. I’m very faze-able — I’m easily fazed. They’re not full of neuroses and doubts like me.” Having all starred on the show together since season one, Lawtey feels as though they’ve experienced something singular: “I feel very fortunate that we just happened to fall into this thing together. We’ve had a very self-evident bond since the beginning that no one else quite understands. We look like quite an odd trio, I think, but there’s a huge amount of love there.” That bond has carried itself beyond the set. When Lawtey finished shooting a recent project, he sang “Valerie” at the karaoke wrap party in Latvia, a tribute to Abela, who was filming the Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, at the time. There’s a video of his rendition out there somewhere in the ether, not that he wants anyone to see it. “At the start of the video, I look down the camera lens and go, ‘Marisa, this one’s for you!’” he says, laughing.

Our plates of food are quickly dwindling, and Lawtey swaps his halloumi for my leftover spanakopita — a tough trade. “I grew up on an almost exclusive halloumi diet,” he says, or “squeaky cheese,” as he often called it. “I went home a couple weeks ago to see my mom and dad. She made me a halloumi sandwich. I was like, This is childhood.” Lawtey’s formative years were certainly unlike most kids’. “I don’t really have any proper memories of England,” he confesses. From ages 5 through 13 — “the bulk” of his childhood — he grew up in Cyprus on the British military base where his father worked (hence the morning helicopter checks). “It’s such a rich place in terms of heritage and personality,” he says. “I miss it.” Lawtey remembers the base as “a melting pot” of British identities in one space, as insular as that can be. “And then it becomes beholden upon the individual in terms of how much you want to embrace the fact that you live in the Mediterranean,” he adds, feeling grateful that his family did take full advantage. He beelined for the beach every day after school, explored the country, made friends off the base, and learned to speak a little Greek.

Photo: Jamie Salmons

When Lawtey moved back to England for drama school, he says, “I felt like I was moving to a foreign country.” He first attended Sylvia Young Theatre School, living in London with a host family and visiting his extended family in the northern town of Barton-upon-Humber on the weekends. Afterward, he attended the notorious Drama Centre, which boasts Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, and Michael Fassbender as fellow grads. “There’s a certain generation of British actors that I’ve worked with, and if they ask you where you trained and you say, ‘Drama Centre,’ almost exclusively they all reply, ‘Ah, Trauma Centre,’” Lawtey says, joking about the school’s nickname. But it helped, he theorizes, that the school’s strict schedule reminded him of home. The Drama Centre was the kind of place where you were expected to show up an hour before class, stay another hour after, and put in the overtime on weekends. “This will sound really wanky, I warn you, but it’s the closest thing you could get in an acting school to joining the military,” he says. “I wanted to feel pushed, and it needs to feel unsteady to some extent. It needs to feel a bit dangerous, because that’s how you get better.”

Photo: Jamie Salmons

Lawtey has slowly been making the transition to movies with small roles in Terence Davies’s war drama, Benediction, and The Pale Blue Eye, a 2022 Netflix adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe novel starring Christian Bale. Auteurist filmmakers, like Luca Guadagnino, have had their eyes on Lawtey, too: He was in early conversations to appear in an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, starring Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara, though the film never came to fruition. But with his supporting turn in Joker: Folie à Deux, he has finally leveled up. In the sequel to Todd Phillips’s $1 billion–grossing prestige take on the iconic Batman villain, Lawtey plays another legendary member of the roster: Gotham politician Harvey Dent (a.k.a. Two-Face). He felt the weight of not only the DC comics on which the movies are based and their fandom but also the weight of all the cinematic renditions of Batman and Harvey Dent (most recently played by Aaron Eckhart in 2008) that came before him. “I was so nervous in the months leading up to it, perilously so,” he remembers. “I was just aware of how seismic this was.” He hardly ever watches his own work (he has not even watched the second season of Industry, he confesses), but the morning of our interview, he watched Folie à Deux in a screening room, out of sight from his team members, “so I didn’t feel they were gauging my reaction,” he says. “I can be a nervous wreck. I watched a film with them a couple years ago, and they said to me, ‘You just had your head in your hands for 70 percent of the film.’”

There was a fear that Folie à Deux would prove to be just as debilitating. The night before his first day on set, he tried to channel that nervous energy into something more positive: “I just said to myself, This is it. You might never be here again. If you can’t enjoy this, then what’s the point?” It helped that Lawtey’s scenes were filmed on the same soundstage where Friends was shot. “On my first day, my lovely driver, Ron, took a photo of me on the sofa in front of the fountain,” he says.

Photo: Jamie Salmons

Lawtey’s introduction to his Folie à Deux co-star Joaquin Phoenix was a kind of baptism by fire. By the time he made it to set for his five-week-long shoot, he had yet to meet Phoenix. “I came to do my first day and he’s in my first scene,” he recalls. “But even then, I hadn’t seen him because he had to sort out some costume thing, so they had his body double do the blocking. So my first shot in the film is a tight close-up of my face. When we rolled on the first take, the first time I ever laid eyes on Joaquin was him walking into the room. There wasn’t a great deal of acting required, really.” Working with Lady Gaga was just as overwhelming. There were days on set when he would just sit and watch her perform musical numbers a few feet away from him. “Suddenly you think, This is an experience that people pay very good money for,” he says.

Then, as we prepare to make our way back to the center of Camden and disappear in the tourist crowds, Lawtey and I chat about being cinephiles and my previous job at Letterboxd. It’s been weighing on him, the fact that every actor and filmmaker on a red carpet is ambushed with that dreaded question: “What are your four favorite movies?” These are the kinds of things he has to consider now that he has graduated to blockbusters. “Surely, you get worried about whether your choices are indicative of your personality,” Lawtey says. He’s at a place right now in which every move he makes may be analyzed and dissected by strangers for entertainment. I offer my advice: There are choices that people will argue are boring or pretentious, but it’s better to be yourself. Lawtey unburdens himself, remembering that high-wire acts are in his DNA. “Whatever happens at the moment under pressure,” he concludes, “that’s good.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Lawtey’s karaoke party was in the United States. It was in Latvia. Additionally, his Joker: Folie à Deux shoot ran for five weeks, not just one. He has also seen some of Industry, but not season two.

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