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Sagar Radia in Industry season four.
Courtesy of HBO
‘Industry’ Star Sagar Radia Spills the Tea on Rishi’s Jaw-Dropping Gamble — Is This His Cosmic Redemption or Career Catastrophe?
Added on February 2, 2026 inTV News Cards
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If ever there was a character who embodies the mercurial whims of fate—spot him in Rishi Ramdani, the combustible force in HBO’s Industry. Just like Mercury retrograde loves to throw a wrench in our plans, Rishi’s journey from shouting on a fictional London trading floor to navigating heartbreak and survival is a wild plunge into the abyss. This week’s episode, “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn,” might just be the last hurrah for Sagar Radia’s unforgettable portrayal—a dive off the proverbial balcony of his tumultuous life. Ever wonder how a South Asian immigrant’s path through high finance gets entangled in drugs, debts, and devastation? Or how does one man balance the chaos of external collapse with the quiet grief simmering beneath? Maybe it’s the stars nudging us to ponder: when life’s market crashes, do you fold or double down? Fasten your seatbelt, because this saga’s blend of grit and grief is as relentless as a Saturn return hitting on a full moon. LEARN MORE
[This story contains spoilers from the fourth episode of Industry season four, “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn.”]
Sagar Radia has never been able to predict the trajectory of Rishi Ramdani. The Industry star, who spent much of the HBO drama’s first season shouting and swearing from the trading floor of fictional London investment bank Pierpoint & Co, has spent years right alongside viewers learning of his character’s own backstory. Last season, Radia brilliantly anchored the standalone episode “White Mischief,” a kinetic character study that revealed Rishi to be wrestling with deep debts and an addiction to making them worse. The season finale brought about a shocking twist to that saga, with his wife murdered by his impatient loan shark.
All the while, the world of Industry, created and predominantly written by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay (Radia calls them “the boys”), was changing rapidly — original series regulars leaving, fresh pivotal characters being introduced, offices dissolving and new ones opening. The first half of season four has seen a despondent Rishi barely scraping by, on the outs of the game that once fueled his day to day, and only able to see his child on supervised visits with his mother in law.
Sunday’s fourth episode, “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn,” may be Radia’s last, the actor tells The Hollywood Reporter. It caps a massive arc and an impressive showcase for an actor few were familiar with before Industry began. The episode ends with Rishi somehow arm-in-arm and getting high with Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton), the journalist who’d been working with Rishi’s sometimes-ally Harper (Myha’la) only to similarly face disgrace from his own profession. Jim overdoses, police are on the way and Rishi — ever the survivor — once again finds himself at a crossroads: Does he accept what seems to be his fate or take matters into his own hands — or in this case, feet?
Naturally, he jumps off the balcony. And while Rishi survives — barely — Radia still views it as a fitting goodbye. “The police pin him down and arrest him, and then there’s that moment of relief where he feels like this is what he deserves,” Radia says. “Everything that’s happened culminates to this moment. It’s almost his redemption.”
Below, Radia joins THR to reflect on his wild Industry ride.
Sagar Radia in Industry season four.
Courtesy of HBO
How was this season presented to you, and how did you approach it?
I had dinner with the boys, and they marked out what they were thinking for the character. They love writing themselves into a corner, that kind of thing of, “How are we going to get out of this?” With Rishi, they felt like they’d written themselves into a corner in terms of the standalone episode that he had — and then also that ending in episode eight with his wife’s [murder]. When I was being asked about it last year — “Where does this go for Rishi?” — I used to always say, “It’s either a redemption arc or he spirals even further down.” For them, for entertainment purposes as well as trying to stay as true and honest to the character as possible, it was always going to be, “Let’s take him further down the rabbit hole.”
But how do we do it in a different way? For that reason, we end up seeing Rishi in a different mode: survival mode is still there, he’s still functioning, he’s still showing up, but he’s emotionally stripped back. The boys wanted to explore what happens when that bravado is gone. He’s quieter, he’s more watchful and he’s essentially carrying a lot of unprocessed grief.
How would you summarize Rishi’s arc on this show? Industry as a whole has evolved so much from those early days in Pierpoint, but if you’d told me we’d have this much insight into Rishi back then, I wouldn’t have much reason to believe you.
I was still part of another show when there was an opportunity to come and do this new show called Industry. It was a very different character to what I was playing on this other show, and I remember the email for the audition saying “minimum two episodes” — which as an actor, you always read as, “Oh, OK, he’ll kind of just pop in for a second and then have hopefully a little impact on the season. Then they disappear.” Cut to us filming the show, and they wanted me across the whole season. The response to him in season one certainly came to my surprise because he was never meant to be a key part of the show, at least in my opinion. He was a personality on the floor, he was a representation of what somebody in that world looks like. The show was about the grads — it was about their POV and their journey into this world, and I was there to give them a hard time and be that person to give them the realities of the world.
There was a wonderful article in the Financial Times out of the U.K. about how Rishi represents the second- or third-generation South Asian immigrant experience, of people going into finance and looking for those lucrative career paths that can set them up for life. I had nothing to do with that interview, and the boys read it and I think they kind of went, “Maybe there’s something there for this character. Let’s kind of indulge and explore and see where it takes us.”
I never saw it coming. Sometimes producers and creators have such a tunnel vision in the way they want to tell a story; very rarely do they veer off that. To Mickey and Konrad’s credit, they kind of went, “No, let’s listen to the Reddit forums. Let’s listen to what the internet is saying. Why don’t we explore the areas that they want to see more of?” I was very lucky to then hold a standalone episode and for that to be received incredibly well — and to now sit here and talk to you about what this arguably final chapter looks like.
This season, his former colleague Sweetpea calls him a murderer. His mother-in-law tells him he’ll never see his child without supervision again. As a viewer, I was taking pity on him at some points — that’s such a dramatic shift from how we first got to know him.
That’s a great observation. He’s recalibrating who he is without the armor that he’s used to having and relied on; he’s not quite chasing power and status in the way that we probably know him to chase. He’s ultimately just trying to stay upright. It’s a really interesting place to meet him because he is not broken yet entirely, but he’s definitely changed. He’s arguably at a crossroads in his life and that he has to learn to exist in this new way or repeat the same patterns. And the tension drives everything you see from him from the top of the season.
One of the reasons people took to Rishi is because he’s a mirror to the moment we’re living in. He’s surviving, he’s functioning — he’s even succeeding on paper — but he’s internally collapsing. That feels reflective of the world that we’re in right now. We are rewarded for endurance rather than honesty, and we praise people for pushing through and not complaining and staying productive no matter what cost that comes at. Rishi has internalized a lot of that.
What was it like to play that, especially having lived with the character for so long? He’s very diminished this season — emotionally, but also just professionally.
We’ve taken the swagger away. What’s left is it is much more exposed and a lot more human. What does somebody look like when they hit rock bottom? I always saw it as your most vulnerable and honest place because everything’s been taken away. You have no choice but to be honest. That came with its own challenges for me. I’ve never played Rishi this quietly before. I relied on his humor, I relied on his swagger. So what happens when that’s all gone away? Playing that silence in a way was revealing. The example that you mentioned, with Sweetpea — in a previous season or a different version of Rishi, he would’ve bit back like a pitbull. He would’ve not had anybody speak to him like that. But the grief he’s now dealing with, the trauma he’s now going through, grief doesn’t come out as tears. It comes out as silence. It comes out as bad decisions; it comes out as survival mode.
I was trying to play the spaces that Rishi didn’t really know how to fill anymore. He doesn’t have it in him anymore to just respond and snap back. He has a very quick moment of saying he’s not a murderer. But that again comes from a survival instinct of going, “I’m not what everyone thinks I am.”
So let’s get into where he is in this particular episode. Why does he follow Dycker?
Rishi is an all-or-nothing kind of guy. He is zero to a hundred and that’s demonstrated in the previous season. We see insight into his addictive personality: He doesn’t do things in halves. As a result, he then indulges Dycker, and they get into this moment together where the alcohol and the drugs ensue. It takes them to another place. They both relish themselves in these environments — they’re leaning on each other for a moment and then it just explodes. They’re just trying to have a good time, trying to let off steam. They need to disappear for a second, and then ultimately there’s massive consequences.
Radia (second from right) with Ken Leung, Myha’la and Marisa Abela in 2024.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
You get the sense early in the scene that something very bad is going to happen. There’s an ominous quality to their bonding.
We certainly tried to create that environment as best you can. A film set is always so mechanical in many ways, and you’ve got people there with their camera and the boom and so you certainly try your best. A few weeks before we shot that, myself, Charlie and our director Michelle [Savill] got the chance to have a rehearsal and we went into a separate room and spoke the words out loud. We experimented with the space and moving around and what that could look like. Not necessarily trying to replicate that for when we shot it, just to get it off its feet. And I made a visit to the set about a week before we shot it: I wanted to see the space that was going to take place and obviously the balcony. I was there with the stunt guys.
When it comes to his decision to actually jump, did you go through different variations of how and when he comes to that decision?
Not really. There’s never just one thing going through his mind when something like that is taking place. Hanging over that balcony, I think it was an amalgamation of different thoughts. He’s trying to get away almost animalistically, like we all would when a cat is pushed into a corner — they’re going to come out fighting because they don’t want to be stuck in there. You may disagree, but Rishi thinks, “OK, well this is not my fault again, I’ve not killed this guy, but it’s going to be on me arguably because it’s my drugs.” In the same way his wife was shot because of his gambling debts. He’s not directly done it, but he’s responsible. So what does he want to do? He wants to get away. He wants to get out of that situation.
There is a moment where he debates whether to call it a day and just go, you know what, it’s not worth it anymore. I think that genuinely goes through his mind. But you see from when he hits the ground, he’s still surviving. He’s still trying to push through. He’s trying to get away even though his legs are absolutely obliterated.
I feel like, in terms of scene partners, your one thread throughout the whole show is Myha’la and Harper. Within Industry’s twisted sense of intimacy, she’s there for him, sort of, when no one else is.
It’s that thing of someone you’ve known for a really long time, whether it’s a work colleague or someone in your personal life, that may not necessarily be your best friend. They may not be someone you speak to all the time. But you’ve known them for a long time and there’s a shared experience that you’ve had with them that nobody else can understand. You still want to make sure they’re OK in some way. That’s not to say you are going to employ them — she was never going to bring him over to the company — but she did help out in small ways by giving him these small brown paper bag jobs. It’s just the human in her and human in him. It also comes from the fact that they’re far more similar than they think, and in a way that’s what always drew them together. That’s why they bumped heads and never really got on and couldn’t trust each other — ultimately one was always screwing over the other to try and climb above.
When I got a chance to chop it up with Harper in that first season, and we had some cool interactions, I as Sagar was feeling like I had to prove myself as an actor on this show. Rishi was a functional part of that season. He had no story. He had no real arc.
Often just shouting.
Often just shouting off camera, yeah. (Laughs.) So that was me partly proving myself to go, “Hey, I can go toe to toe with our lead character.” Then you go to season two where me and Myha’la, Rishi and Harper, are sparring on a bigger level with these big trades. As actors, we both challenged each other and pushed each other to be better. I loved that, man. It was such a fun time doing those scenes with her. I don’t think I got to do it with anybody else to that extent. So she was a great tennis partner in the way where you hit the ball back and see what happens.
You must’ve had some funny ADR sessions after filming had ended, where you’re just kind of tasked to yell, right?
I’d go into a studio months after we completed filming, and they would just have a sheet of lines that they’d written out — and I would just fire them off and then they’d plot them in where they wanted to. Everyone was like, “Oh my God, Rishi saying this amazing stuff off camera.” I was like, “Yeah, but it wasn’t literally in the moment.” The sound department would be like, “Shut up!” (Laughs.) They would not be happy about that. But it was really fun to go into a studio afterwards, when it was all said and done, and lay down these lines. It gives you an insight into Mickey and Konrad’s minds.
You said earlier that this episode marks the “arguably final chapter.” Is this it for you on Industry?
Listen, never say never. I don’t know, is the truth. It feels like it is. I think the boys like to exit characters when they feel as though they’ve exited the world of Industry. You saw that when Gus (David Jonsson) got on a private plane in season two and left with Jay [Duplass]’s character. You saw that when Robert (Harry Lawtey) ended up in California. This is its own version for Rishi, where everything that he has been a part of has caught up to him in this moment. Is there a slither of hope that we could still see Rishi? Of course there is. He’s not dead. But I would think it was it. But again, never say never. One thing that you can’t do is write anything off on this show.
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