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When Toheeb Jimoh joined the cast of Industry season four, he was given one simple direction from the show’s creators.
“They just said: ‘Make him less of a douche,’” Jimoh remembers. In the world of Industry, this is a pretty atypical request. The hit HBO show sits on the Succession and Game of Thrones end of the spectrum when it comes to the likeability of its characters. They lie, cheat, and steal, repeatedly. Many of them also regularly commit insider trading, allude to incest, and inhale copious amounts of cocaine.
But maybe Jimoh is just innately likeable. Before his turn as playful finance bro Kwabena Bannerman, the 28-year-old actor was best known for playing Sam Obisanya in Ted Lasso – the nicest footballer in the nicest Apple TV+ show about nice footballers. The extreme end of the likeability spectrum.
Ted Lasso was a runaway success, earning a total of 61 Emmy nominations across its three-year run, including a supporting actor nomination for Jimoh. The show’s soft focus on men’s mental health even landed the cast a trip to The White House, where they posed for pictures in the Oval Office with President Joe Biden.
This milestone was surely approved of by Jimoh’s parents, who once believed he would be the first Black Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But that wasn’t the path Jimoh envisioned for himself. As a Brixton boy who was educated at the performing arts-focused Norwood School in Lambeth, acting was always the aim. In lieu of national leadership, a starring role on a viral HBO prime time show is surely a pretty good fallback. Are Jimoh’s parents aware of the show’s roaring success? “No!” laughs Jimoh, entirely unsurprised. As it turns out, they haven’t even watched it yet. “I’m not that excited for my parents to watch Industry, they can stick to Ted Lasso,” he jokes.
This is understandable, considering Jimoh is naked within his first ten minutes of screentime in Industry season four. His first sex scene is one of Industry’s many explicit moments, and it also happened to be the first thing he shot for the show. “I put in my audition, had a meeting with Mickey and Konrad – it was like a 10 minute zoom,” he says of the unexpectedly rapid casting process, “and then I was on set naked.”
Luckily, he had a perfect scene partner in My’hala, who plays the ruthlessly ambitious Harper Stern. “I think she was actually really excited to have an intimacy scene,” he says. “In the last season, she hadn't had any intimacy scenes, so she was just excited to do one again, which was really funny. It was nice to have her on set, plus the whole Industry team are so used to those scenarios that it ended up being a really chill and comfortable day.”
Jimoh really gets a chance to shine in this week’s episode, too, where Kwabena and his colleague Sweetpea Golightly travel to Accra, in Ghana, in an attempt to uncover the shady activities of online payment system Tender. It’s a pleasing departure from the glass-panelled offices and hotel rooms that typically play host to the events of Industry, and one Jimoh took great pleasure in. “I was looking at the rest of the cast in the read through and I was like ‘I’m going on holiday!’” he says, beaming. “I definitely felt like the lucky one of the group.”
They shot the episode in South Africa across three or four days, making the schedule incredibly fast paced. “The whole thing felt like we were on a mission the same way the characters were,” Jimoh remembers. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for a good time. “We were shooting on beaches at 6am watching the sun come up, or filming in karaoke bars with a load of South Africans who were just singing along — the whole thing felt like a bit of a party holiday,” he says.
So much so that the entire cast and crew nearly missed their flight home to London. “We were shooting the day we were gonna fly back to London. So we got the shot, then decided that we deserved to go and chill by the pool in the hotel. There’s a lovely picture of us all swimming. And then we realised, ‘Oh, we should have left for the airport 30 minutes ago.’ We had to sweet talk our way onto that plane.”
Behind the scenes might have been blissful, but episode five is a high-stakes, non-stop 58 minutes which proves pivotal to the plot of the series. It’s also the most we’ve seen of Sweetpea, a character fans have become increasingly fond of over the past two seasons. “Miriam's a brilliant actress and a really wonderful person,” Jimoh says, “I couldn't have asked for a better tag team partner. [Sweetpea and Kwabena] are polar opposite people, they have polar opposite approaches to work, and it's just really interesting to put two people like that on screen together for an episode and see how much they irritate each other.”
One of the great joys of being an actor in the Industry universe is getting to chew over its notoriously dense dialogue, often littered with financial jargon and IYKYK cultural references. “It’s a whirlwind. It's like, ‘the roller coaster is moving. Grab on if you can, if you can't, good luck,’” Jimoh says of the scripts. “And I'd rather have that than one line every scene. I'd rather deal with chunky text like that. There's so much to unpick and ping out. And it's easy to learn because it's written in the unique rhythm and cadence that Industry has.”
Does that mean he always understood what was going on? Not entirely. “I was blowing [creators] Mickey and Konrad’s phones up, voicenoting those boys. There were times when I’d be on the phone with Mickey in my trailer for like 20 minutes as we're trying to figure out what this finance jargon means, then we realise it doesn't make sense, because the numbers don't add up, and then we're reworking the entire thing. I really nerd out when problem-solving like that, so it was fun.”
But Jimoh wants to be clear he’s not suddenly an expert on finance, in case anyone starts seeking his advice or investing tips. “Don’t give me your money,” he laughs, then pauses, “I mean — give me your money, but expect very little of it.”
Right now, Jimoh doesn’t have time to think about money. The Industry season four promotional trail is ongoing, and it’s nearly as unrelenting as the fictional universe it depicts. “I don’t think I’ve ever made so many TikToks,” he says. “HBO are just like ‘Another one, another one!’” But the virality is part of what makes it special.
“You know, everybody wants to do stuff that feels like it's part of the zeitgeist in the way that Industry is,” he says. “I’m not going to spend my career chasing hype, but it is really lovely to be a part of something that's impacting this many people, and that so many people have an opinion on.”
Industry Season 4 is streaming now on BBC One and is available to watch on iPlayer
