There is no release for Henry, who is left holding a ringing phone. Yasmin has sold him out to his uncle, Lord Norton, who’s preparing to run a devastating Tender story on the front page of the newspaper he owns. Henry cannot find Yasmin at home and arrives at the office to be informed she resigned that afternoon. This betrayal, which runs parallel to Muck’s betrayal by Whitney, Down says, is in motion from the moment Henry “crosses the Rubicon in his marriage in the first scene,” because there are “echoes of her father in the way that he speaks to her, which she can no longer ignore.”
“In Henry’s entirely self-centered head, she is an amazing chapter in the story of Henry Muck. And he ends up being a tragic chapter in the story of Yasmin Kara-Hanani, I think,” said Harington. “We thought a lot about how this season, Whitney is daddy to Henry and Yasmin is mummy. Both mummy and daddy throw him under the bus to save themselves.”
Still, Down and Kay find it hard not to root for Henry a little, as one of the very few characters in the show who actually wants to make society better, even if it is out of some sort of twisted sense of noblesse oblige. Even Minghella saw a way into Whitney through how he empathized with Henry.
“I found Henry deeply relatable to where I was at in my life at the time. He’s a stunted person, the same age as me, and I think of myself as quite a stunted person,” Minghella told me. “The affection that Whitney feels for Henry, whether it’s entirely authentic or not, was something that I found easy to play because it felt like I was trying to be sympathetic to myself.”
In the last episode of Industry season four, reality arrives like a bad comedown, particularly for Henry. “He’s finally given consequences at the end of episode seven, which I think he’s expecting, and kind of enjoys in a very weird way,” says Down.
Harington saw the end of episode seven, with his character under fire, a little more defiantly: “For a guy like Henry, it’s time to press every nuclear button there is.”