There exists out there, somewhere in the cloud, a video of Industry’s Harry Lawtey eating his first oyster. “Years ago,” he tells me, as we both gaze at oysters on the menu of a fancy steak restaurant in Canary Wharf. To celebrate shooting the pilot of the first season, Lena Dunham – who directed the first episode of the culty, widely acclaimed banking drama – took the cast out to a restaurant. “Which was surreal in itself,” Lawtey adds. “And while we were there, we thought – we were very young and like, new – and thought: ‘Hey, let’s make the most of this! It might not last forever!’” An enormous plate of oysters was ordered – ”I’d never had them before. I’d barely even seen an oyster in my life before.” – and a contentious argument around the table about how he should tackle his first-ever luxury mollusc. “Whether you swallow it or chew it or any of that crap. I think I went for swallow.” And the review? “I stand by what I said in the video: I just downed it and immediately said, 'Why do people do that'?'” We skip starters.
To understand Harry Lawtey, you have to understand that everything in his life is either football, can be traced back to football, or can be turned into an easy-to-digest football analogy. Here is how he describes his parents, for instance, who met as highschool sweethearts in the town just outside Hull that most of his family still occupies: “They were sort of like the Posh and Becks of Barton-Upon-Humber.” Here’s how he describes a recent showing at a local pub quiz where the team marking his and his friends’ sheet openly laughed aloud at some of their answers, a humiliation he will never forgive or forget: “You want something respectable, at least. You’ve got to find your level.” Here’s him talking about one of his most beloved Drama Centre teachers, who he’s still in touch with to this day: “She had this amazing kind of knack of, she'd give you criticism, but made you feel good about it. Which is such a hard thing to do. It's the same with football managers." Here’s a video of him clinically finishing the Crossbar Challenge on a particularly chaotic pandemic episode of Soccer AM. He supports Hull City and tries to cram in four or five games every Christmas – his dad is in the RAF, and as a result Lawtey considers home to be Barton-upon-Humber, a bit of Oxford, but mostly Cyprus – and has to dip out of our interview to cross town and watch Notts County (where his brother is a first-team coach) hammer Wealdstone 1-6 in the National League. Between drama school and the success of regular acting gigs, he juggled auditions with cinema shifts and stewarding gigs at London football grounds. If anything, it’s kind of strange he got into acting at all. He should have just been a weird adult ballboy.
But then you see him do it. The first breakthrough was Industry, the HBO shagging-and-banking masterwork that follows six graduates through their first years at fictional London bank Pierpoint & Co, where Lawtey’s Robert Spearing was a season one revelation: a watching-football-at-home-in-his-shorts, pint-and-a-line lads’ lad who variously played the flirty little slut, the faux cocksure Oxford graduate, and a man obsessed with class – both where he came from and where he wants to give the illusion of being (He also ejaculated halfway across a room onto a mirror.) By season 2, Rob had taken on a newer, more complicated texture: Wounded following a psychosexual affair with Marisa Abela’s Yasmin and a bruising end-of-term report, he was now a washed-out version of his former self, self-flagellatingly sober and too afraid to answer the phone to clients in front of his peers. The beauty of Industry is every character is a bit of a monster who is constantly out for themselves, and watching their fuck-you peaks is satisfying only because you know they will soon be followed by a fuck-you trough. But Lawtey’s knack of occupying the gloopy grey space between cocky and tender lends Rob an air of earnest, soft-bellied likeability. No one on TV has ever ridden a motorcycle – for decades, the aesthetic shorthand for cool! – with less conviction than Robert Spearing in the hands of Harry Lawtey. That takes skill.
Now Lawtey is levelling up to movie stardom with The Pale Blue Eye, Netflix’s spooky 1830s-era murder mystery, where Christian Bale plays a classic Christian Bale character – psychically wounded man rolled out for one last swing at the big time, tongue always touching at his back teeth while he proves himself to be the smartest person in the room. Lawtey plays opposite him as Artemis Marquis, the cocky trainee cadet and de facto king of the jocks, who has a certain tender softness that makes him human. In real life, Lawtey is almost alarmingly wholesome – he has perfect, old-fashioned please-and-thank-you manners, is as engaged a listener as he is a talker, and just exudes a palpable sweetheart energy. And perhaps inverting that is what makes him so effective on screen. With both Robert Spearing and Artemis Marquis, he’s played the kind of smug smiling shark you logically want to hate but can’t help but root for a little. Watch him in The Pale Blue Eye and walk away thinking: You know what, actually? Maybe I should grow some Jackson-era sideburns.
On set in Pittsburgh, Lawtey was surrounded by talent – as well as Bale and Melling. “Christian Bale is one of my acting heroes. So that is mad, obviously. Like I was in a scene with him, and then there’s that stupid inner monologue going, ‘That’s Christian Bale! You… idiot!’”. He also had Toby Jones as Artemis' doctor father, Timothy Spall as the permanently-squinting West Point academy head, Charlotte Gainsbourg as a sort of ‘we need to pass the Bechdel Test quite desperately, actually’ bar wench, Harry Melling giving an extraordinary performance as a young Edgar Allen Poe, and Gillian Anderson (whose lines are mostly about how beautiful and handsome her son is) as his mother. The joy and privilege of being part of such a stacked cast was not, for a second, lost on him.
“There was a day where we were filming this scene in this amazing gothic cemetery a while out of Pittsburgh, and it was freezing – like, -10, the snow up to your knees – but because it was one of the few ensemble scenes in the film most of the cast were there. So between takes we were all huddled around this tiny heater thing, the kind you put in your living room at Christmas, and I just realised: on one side of me is Timothy Spall, and the other side was Toby Jones. And I’m just stood there like a lemon in the middle. I’m like: Man, these are the guys! To be amongst these people was really cool. And I know it sounds like a cliché to say, but I genuinely learned a lot.”
I press on this, because this is an interesting moment for Lawtey. He’s just turned 26, he’s hot off the back of a second season of an increasingly hyped HBO show and preparing for a recently commissioned third, he’s just back from Pittsburgh with Christian Bale, he’s just in post-production for a Russell T. Davies-produced ITVX show, he’s about to fly to Latvia to film Anna alongside Maxine Peake and Jason Isaacs, and he’s just been announced as support in the Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga either-masterpiece-or-disaster musical Joker: Folie à Deux. His name has been softly lofted into the eternal Bond conversation, but then so has mine at this point, and so has yours, too. His is one you can actually see happening, though: his face at certain angles is Craigesque, the same jawline that could at once win a fight in a carpeted town centre pub as it could convince a hotel receptionist to give up a keycard; you can see him shuffling neatly into a well-cut suit, you can see him seducing the magnetic women the series demands, you can see him broodingly smoking a cigarette on a balcony before coolly winning a hand of poker. Our waiter brings us complimentary sides because Lawtey is so graciously polite. What did Timothy Spall have to teach him?
“Well, for one: there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he tells me, and this is where you learn that Lawtey is as obsessed with acting as he is with football. “The whole of acting is silly. Like they call it ‘a play’ for a reason – it’s a mess around. So the idea of formalising or conceptualising to an extent where you believe that there's one right way to do it – that’s pretty stupid.” There’s a lot to love about acting – warming your hands with Auf Weidersen, Pet castmembers, visiting new countries you’ve never been able to experience before, watching a prop guy rig up a machine to shoot fake ejaculate halfway across a room onto a mirror – but one Lawtey treasures most is the quick-family bond of an ensemble cast and learning at the feet of his elders. “It’s a negotiation— actually, it’s a collaboration. That's what it’s like being on a set.” (Lawtey’s catering trailer ice-breaker is, “What’s your favourite biscuit?”, though he’s one of those weirdos who doesn’t like hot drinks: “I have to take ownership over that. I never want a coffee.”). The thrill, for him, is being a moving part in a complicated machine: doing one job, your job, as well as possible, in the centre of a whirr of people doing theirs. “I love it – I’m obsessed with it, actually. It’s my favourite thing! It’s sick! I get paid to do the thing I do as a hobby! But it’s the most collaborative thing you could do, because there's experts everywhere you look. And they're all responsible for that piece of this jigsaw that you're kind of making, and you just want to do your piece right, but you can't do it right without kind of negotiating the way that someone else wants to do their piece as well. It's the best.”
So he must love watching himself back and learning (or cringing) at how his jigsaw-piece collaboration efforts came out, right? Silence. Right? He looks down at the maple-coated bacon his perfect manners managed to blag us. Harry? You’ve… watched Industry season 2, right? “I find it really hard,” he says to the table. “I think at this juncture, I think I’m really going through a phase of wrestling with the right standpoint for these sorts of thoughts. Because if I’m going to be paid for a job I want to do well, I want to be as good as I can. And at the same time, I want to enjoy it. And I have a real desire to improve and get better.” He hasn’t watched his own work back for a year, now, and doesn’t immediately see that changing. “Like I say: I come from a football family, and the language of my family is football – it’s how I talk to my dad and my brother, who is not from this world whatsoever. And so the way I relate my feelings is through football. And I sort of think of it like: well, I can’t imagine Marcus Rashford doesn’t go home and think, ‘How could I have done this better?’. But at some point you have to draw a line and go, ‘You know what, this is an enormous privilege to do, I’m being paid to do the thing I’d do for free. That’s a gift. And it’s almost insulting not to enjoy that and revel in the experience.”
I tell him there’s a scene in Industry season 2 – which he hasn’t seen, so I have to recount it in detail – that really struck me. It’s where Robert makes a doomed return to Oxford, has a boorish wad-flashing encounter with his estranged father, and (painfully, for the viewer) relapses into drink and drugs. It’s 5 p.m. and the sun’s still in the sky and there Harry Lawtey is, clucking and doing a key, frantically ringing his old dealer to see if the number still works. There’s another scene, in the first series, where Robert and Harper get coke-high and blathery, that was fully improvised in four short takes by Lawtey and fellow rising star My’hala Herrold, that’s similarly affecting: basically, Harry Lawtey is really really good at acting like he’s whirringly, horribly high. How does a man whom Industry co-creator Konrad Kay described to me as, “A total, unimpeachable sweetheart [who] doesn’t like drugs” manage to do that on the day?
“He said that? Ha,” Harry says, as he watches me drink a coffee on the terrace of a café by Canary Wharf station before we part ways. “I did do some Googling before the first season. God, how embarrassing is that?” I wave my hand in the air as if to say: a medium amount. “I don’t know. I mean, how do you act anything? It’s all just a stab in the dark, isn’t it? Acting is a never-ending attempt at a sensation. It’s mimicry. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, and things fall into place, then you feel the thing you want to feel, but if not, then that’s where your technique comes in. And that’s where you do the work.”
The Pale Blue Eye is out in UK cinemas on 23 December, and on Netflix on 6 January 2023.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Tung Walsh
Styling Angelo Mitakos
Grooming by Charlie Cullen at Gary Represents using Dior Beauty
