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Industry star Marisa Abela has questioned the BBC’s decision to edit out a scene in the show’s final season.
The hit HBO drama, which follows a group of young graduates navigating the cut-throat finance world in London, has earned critical acclaim since airing its first season in 2020.
The series, a co-production between HBO and BBC, has gained a reputation as the “wildest” show on television thanks to its hard-partying characters and frequent sex scenes.
In a new interview with The Times, one of the show’s stars spoke about the season three scene that was considered too explicit for British viewers.
Abela, 27, stars as Yasmin Kara-Hanani, the privileged daughter of a publishing billionaire Charles Hanani (played by Adam Levy).
In the first episode of the third season, which aired in the US in August, viewers glimpsed an erect penis belonging to Charles caught in a sexual encounter with a pregnant member of staff on his superyacht.
The explicit scene, however, was cut by the BBC when the series finally landed in the UK this week (1 October).
When asked about the omission from the British broadcast by The Times, Abela questioned: “What are they going to do, put something else over the top of it?”
“Are they going to blur it out?” she continued. “It is quite shocking, to be fair. But that’s not the point.”
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She also argued that the inclusion of the penis was not gratuitous as it demonstrates the dysfunctional dynamic between her character and her father.
Elsewhere in the interview, Abela spoke about her own sex scenes in the series.
“I don’t necessarily push back on the sex. I understand that it’s part of the show,” she said. “I think I’m just more careful now about what it is that’s being seen.”
Abela, who recently starred as Amy Winehouse in the controversial biopic of the musician Back to Black, said of appearing nude: “The nudity aspect is not something that I minded in season one or two – it was like, ‘If it’s in my contract, I’ll do it.’
“It was part of Yasmin and part of the fact that she was so comfortable with herself and she’s very free. And it didn’t have a lot of emotional weight for me.”
“It’s not like anyone would have made me do something that I didn’t want to do, but I didn’t necessarily want to question the directors,” she said.
“But I think now I’m more aware of the implications of doing it over and over again. And I’m more aware that I have the ability to say, ‘Do you mind staying on my back rather than coming round the front? You get the idea from my back that I’m not wearing anything.’”
In a four-star review of Industry season three, The Independent’s TV critic Nick Hilton wrote: “For people wanting a quiet evening in front of the telly, Industry is a terrible option. It’s relentless, nasty, sexy, vulgar, and all the other adjectives generally reserved for TripAdvisor reviews of Berghain.”
