Industry’s Trevor White on the Tragedy of Bill Adler

“On Industry, you definitely know when it’s like, ‘Oh, those two guys are getting along? This is looking good!’ It’s not going to be good.� Photo: Nick Strasburg

Spoilers follow for Industry’s third season through seventh episode “Useful Idiot,� which premiered September 22 on HBO.

Industry’s body count keeps rising. Season three’s penultimate episode, “Useful Idiot,� is a bloodbath for Pierpoint, as the bank’s overwhelming debts and shoddy decision-making finally catch up to it and put Pierpoint on an irreversible path for a sale to another financial institution. But only one character dies both literally and metaphorically: Trevor White’s Bill Adler, the man who has cleaned up more than one Pierpoint mess over the years and who ultimately becomes the bank’s scapegoat for its catastrophic ESG mistakes.

“Unless I come back as a Banquo ghost, that’s probably very literally it,� White says with a laugh, after sharing that Adler was almost written off the show with a Me Too story line in season two. “I’m going to pitch for a flashback, obviously, playing squash or something.�

Adler — who earlier in the season told fellow Pierpoint lifer Eric Tao (Ken Leung) that he has brain cancer — spends the episode convinced that Eric is on his side in wanting to protect Pierpoint’s autonomy. As an increasingly desperate Adler promises Eric a promotion, invites Mitsubishi in for a meeting about a capital injection, and quotes Michael Mann’s Heat, he’s unaware that Eric has already flipped sides. When Eric reveals Adler’s diagnosis in the Mitsubishi meeting and suggests his ailing health has caused mistakes damaging to Pierpoint, Eric’s stabbing his longtime colleague in the back, just like his onetime protégé Harper Stern (Myha’la) did to him.

It’s a full-circle moment typical of Industry, the emotional impact of which is directly tied to how White plays Adler. He’s stiff with shock at Eric’s betrayal, wild-eyed at his secret being exposed, and then resigned at being ousted from the bank to which he’d devoted his professional career. “It’s like raising kids. When it’s really great, you know it’s not going to entirely last. And when you can’t sleep for a week, you know it’s not going to last,� White says of Adler and Eric’s short-lived alliance. “On Industry, you definitely know when it’s like, ‘Oh, those two guys are getting along? This is looking good!’ It’s not going to be good.�

Industry started with Hari’s death, and since then, it has always felt like Pierpoint demands a pound of flesh from its employees. Did you ever anticipate that outcome for Adler? 
It’s never nice to come to an end, but listen, if you’re going to come to an end, you want to come to a memorable end. And it certainly feels like that. I didn’t find out until quite late what was actually happening. Between seasons, they said, “Oh, you’ve got a really rich story line for season three,� and I thought, Well, that’s good. It was while we were filming episodes one and two that Mickey and Konrad explained to me why I was repeating. I tell Eric about the cancer in episode five, and in episode seven, he takes advantage of that in the most cruel and horrible and Industry way. But the quality of the writing is so good, and the way that they bring Eric and Bill, those two characters that have had a lot of history, together during Bill’s revelation of this deeply personal secret — they’ve never been closer. I genuinely believe that they really are in that moment as close as two humans could be.

I’ve thought of Bill as very practical. He defends Eric against Harper. He tells Eric to fire Yasmin. Then when they get into the boardroom, suddenly he’s being attacked for defending what he thinks Pierpoint represents; he’s being treated as sentimental. Did you approach it like the room was already out to get Bill before Eric shared his health status? 
No, I don’t think it’s that. I went to university in economics and I really thought I was going to be a version of Bill Adler, or, back in my generation, Gordon Gekko, Bud Fox. That’s really the path I was on. I’ve traded and sold stocks. I didn’t go that way, obviously, and I’m grateful to get to play a character who is that, because it reminds me — especially with the way it goes for Bill — why I didn’t want to go that way. [Laughs]

But generationally, I think there’s a real difference between someone who’s a Gen-Xer like him, someone who worked a lot of time in Japan, where the institution is absolutely the king and the individual is subsumed into that, and then the American model where the individual is everything, which is more of a millennial thing. It’s really shifted. And I think not all that’s a bad thing, that people aren’t just going to be beholden to the big company and allow themselves to be overworked and underpaid forever. For what? So they can say they never missed a day of work in their life? Bill would be that guy that would be there 14 hours a day at minimum, five to six days a week, and would not think anything of it. I suppose it does come across as romantic, but there’s a combination of practical and romantic that I really love in the guy. I really believe that he wants what’s best for the company, and it also happens to be what’s good for him.

So much of this episode is about Bill and Eric’s relationship, the years of history and competition there, before Eric stabs him in the back at the CFO’s request. How did you and Ken work together? 
Unfortunately we had to film the scene in episode five later; that actually came after we’d done episode seven. I wish we’d had that before, to have that extra thing when you have that actual moment you really had as two human beings. It only informs the betrayal all the more, but because of scheduling, we couldn’t make that happen.

We were in that boardroom set for days on end. We didn’t have to even pretend we were tired or sweaty or annoyed. That’s what happens when you spend 80 hours in a room over five or six consecutive days. It’s not a big room, with that many people in it all the time, and the lights — you didn’t have to act. I almost prefer it that way. It informed the claustrophobia. It all happened as much as it could in the moment.

What emotions did you want to come forward for Bill in his final moments? 
You have to get to a place where your mind is being questioned and brought out from beneath you in the most pressure-packed moment of your entire life. I’m completely blindsided by Eric. I knew there was going to have to be a certain heightened emotional connection to those moments. I didn’t honestly know what that would mean, other than it was just going to be awful. Because this is someone who’s defined themselves by their work and how they work and the success of their work, and there’s been nothing other than validation for that, up until that moment.

There were versions where I was breaking down even more in the boardroom, but then that wouldn’t quite make sense for the attempt at a bounce-back in the elevator, which is then ruined again. Even that final moment, there were versions of me crumbling in the elevator or versions of me being more defiant, which is I think what they’ve chosen, a kind of “Fuck you, Eric.� There was some version of a line like, “If this is who you are, then good luck living with yourself.� But I think less is more in this case.

One could argue that Adler’s getting what’s coming to him; he himself says “nobody owes anybody a tomorrow here.� But it is brutal to see the new CEO shrug off all his contributions and make Adler a scapegoat. Where do you fall within that spectrum on Adler, if he’s a tragic figure or a victim of the machine that he helped create? 
I think it’s both. We see in Harper and in Eric that they are willing to do anything to triumph personally and professionally, and I don’t think Adler would understand that, or at least would understand it more in the rules that existed from yesteryear. That might mean sweeping a Me Too thing under the carpet, because to Adler, Nobody got hurt. We’re good. The institution doesn’t suffer.

There was a Canadian documentary called The Corporation. It was about how corporations are legally treated as individuals, and if a corporation is profiled, it aligns almost terrifyingly as a psychopath. And I think there’s certainly sociopathic qualities in some of the other characters in Industry, that they disregard other human feeling or consequence, just for their own good. And I really don’t think that’s Adler. I think it is all about the bottom line. You got to produce; you either sell the most cars, or you’re fired at the end of the month. It’s Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross; it’s that guy, pure capitalism embodied. I actually thought about that Jessica Rabbit quote from Who Framed Roger Rabbit: She says, “I’m not bad� —

“I’m just drawn that way.�
Yeah, I feel that Adler has a certain similarity to that. He’s not bad, he’s just grown up that way. He’s a victim of the very system that he is championed from and understood to be the only way to operate.

In this episode, Adler quotes Heat when he tells Eric that for him, “the action is the juice,� which made me scream. What did you think of that Michael Mann reference?
I’m glad you got that. Conrad and Mickey threw in Randolph and Mortimer as a Trading Places reference; they’re obviously big cinephiles. I was like, “This feels like it’s from …� And they were like, “Oh, yeah.� And I was like, “Oh, yeah!� It’s fun when that happens, because people like yourself can enjoy that on two levels. Even when Adler is talking to Eric, Eric is saying, “How do you have the energy for this? Jesus.� I love that, and the fact that it has this whole extra layer of resonance. You want to say a line that’s fun and memorable, and that’s one of those ones I’ll always cherish.