Kit Harington Joins ‘Industry’ Season 3 As a New Kind of Tech Bro CEO: “We Had This Joke About How Many Times He Uses the Word ‘Vulnerable’”

When Industry Season 3 premieres on HBO tonight, fans of the smart, sexy series will be introduced to a whole new power player shaking things up for the crew at Pierpoint. Game of Thrones alum Kit Harington plays Sir Henry Muck, an idealistic aristocrat prepping to go public with his green energy company, Lumi. The money men and women at Pierpoint are betting big on Muck and Lumi, pushing the company’s stock to its investors and dispatching Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) to essentially babysit the mercurial CEO.

Kit Harington’s arrival on the show also offers a meta jolt of energy, however. For a decade, his face was synonymous with HBO’s biggest, most popular hit, Game of Thrones. Much like Pierpoint is hoping Lumi will prove to be the next big thing in financial sectors, some Industry heads have been feverishly wondering if Harington will help finally pull casual HBO subscribers into the cult hit’s orbit. Everyone who’s seen Industry knows it’s a brilliant, brash show — including Kit Harington, himself.

“Kit came to the show,” Industry co-creator Konrad Kay told Decider during a recent interview. “He was a fan of the show and Henry preexisted him.”

Kit Harington is actually so much of an Industry fan that he revealed at recent press conference that he doesn’t like the many comparisons critics make to other HBO shows, like Succession or Euphoria.

“I actually don’t like it being compared to other shows. I know we do it all the time, but being compared to like Succession and Euphoria and all of that? It’s its own thing,” Harington said. “I thought it was entirely unique as a show and that’s why I kind of jumped at the chance to be in it when it came out.”

“The truth about Kit is like, he’s world famous? Like, we knew Jon Snow. Everyone knows Jon Snow. He’s great in that show,” Kay told Decider. “But what was gratifying to us was that he could just slot in. He’s very egoless guy, came in, and made the character his own.”

And who exactly is Sir Henry Muck? Well, he’s simultaneously very familiar and refreshingly new. He comes from the vaunted background of the English aristocracy, but he also wants to be on the forefront of a green revolution.

“The inspiration was we wanted to write a tech CEO, but not make him feel like a retread of Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann and all these guys,” Kay said. “Like we wanted to write about specifically British thing, which was a kind of a hyper-education, a level of privilege which begets a level of expectation.”

“People like Henry can go through their whole lives failing upwards. All of their upside is up to them and all of their downside is basically capped by blaming other people.”

“I’ve known a lot of people like Henry,” Harington said at the aforementioned press conference. “I think that what I found fascinating about him was that he can’t see his own privilege. Amazingly, he might say he does, but he can’t see it. He’s kind of within this net of privilege that he can’t see out of and can’t see how he’s held. And yet at the same time within that little gilded cage, these horrific things have happened in his life.”

Industry fans will learn more about the horrors that have visited Henry as the season goes on, but there’s a grim hint of it in tonight’s Season 3 premiere. When Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is called to check in on Henry at his home, he commiserates with her over the scandal surrounding her embezzler father. He explains that he knows what it’s like to have a parent’s sins held against you.

“I thought that was a sort of fascinating place to start with someone and explore someone in that place of privilege, yet they’re deeply, deeply, deeply not happy,” Harington said.

One of the things that makes Henry Muck all the more fun to watch is how he also represents a new kind of male menace.

“We had this joke going about how many times he uses the word ‘vulnerable’ in the show,” Harington said, prompting laughs. “He’s that modern guy who’s gone to therapy and understands fully that the world has changed and that he, as a man, has to change with it, but will now manipulate women with therapy chat. He can’t see it.”

“I just thought, what a wonderful character to get on board with.”

“People had no idea that he had that kind of comic lightness to him because, in ten years on Thrones, he wasn’t allowed to make a joke,” Kay told Decider.

 Industry Season 3 premieres on HBO and Max tonight, Sunday, August 11, at 9 PM ET.